


SHIELD Support Staff

by sirriamnis



Category: Black Widow - Fandom, Captain America, Iron Man - Fandom, MCU, Marvel, Marvel Comics, shield - Fandom
Genre: Gen, OCs - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 09:41:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 52
Words: 32,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26969923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirriamnis/pseuds/sirriamnis
Summary: Edit: I feel like I should apologize for how many there are.  I had not realized.This is the contents of a Tumblr I started years ago, and I feel like I should port it over here for safe keeping.  It's a series of profiles of OCs I created between 2017 and 2018.I’ve developed this head canon where everyone who works for SHIELD is, for the most part, a complete badass.  You know, the janitors, cooks, HR people…  Not all of them come from a military background, though many do.I’m also seeking to address the overwhelming whiteness of the MCU and insert some POC into this head canon of mine.  Many of these characters are very loosely based on people I’ve met, or have heard stories of from others. Many are completely fictive.  And many are an amalgamation of the two.I am always open to suggestions, or even including yours with attribution.   It may take me a while to respond.Neither SHIELD, the logo, nor any of the canon characters belong to me, they are the property of Marvel.  And I will try to keep their involvement to a minimum.  Thank you.
Kudos: 2





	1. Biltewski, Ethel (no middle initial). Head of Human Resources

Ethel (no middle name) Biltewski was born in Long Island, NY in 1921. She is a short, stocky woman who keeps her hair in a steel grey beehive/bouffant hairstyle, wears cats-eye glasses (with rhinestone accents) kept on a beaded chain around her neck when she isn’t wearing them, there is some debate over whether or not she actually needs them, and smokes about a pack of Winstons a day using a long stemmed cigarette holder. Her office is the only smoking area onboard any of the Helicarriers other than the deck. And is also the reason SHIELD has such good air-scrubbing technology. She dresses in a dark navy skirt suit, with a dove grey silk blouse every day, stockings and low-heeled navy and ivory spectator pumps, with a discreet SHIELD lapel pin. There are rumors that she received a watered down version of the Super Soldier serum, or possibly a blood transfusion from Captain America when her plane went down during wartime, which might explain her longevity.  
  
She flew as a WASP in WWII joining up as soon as the call went out. After the war, she became a truck driver, and a Union Organizer for the Teamsters, driving truck for a slaughterhouse.   
  
Peggy Carter found her due to her work in the Teamsters and her record in the war. She asked her to become SHIELD’s Human Resources person due to her ability to wrangle the truckers and dock stewards she’d been dealing with in the Unions.

To this day, Ethel has a photo of Peggy on the wall of her office.

She married briefly after the war, but divorced over her husband’s desire for her to quit her job and have children, taking back her maiden name. She doesn’t talk about him. Ever. If asked, she waves a hand dismissively and blows a cloud of cigarette smoke at the questioner so thick that even SHIELD’s airscrubbers have difficulty dealing with it for a moment.   
  
Some people might think someone as old as Ethel might have antiquated ideas, but she takes every new social advancement as it comes. She was recruiting African Americans into SHIELD before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. As she told Peggy, “We want the best, the toughest, and I don’t give two shits what color their skin is. My only concern is, ‘Can they do the job?’” She may have anonymously donated large portions of her salary to the NAACP, NOW, ACLU, SPLC and Lambda Legal over the years.   
  
Ethel cracked one of her rare smiles when SHIELD found Captain Rogers, and may have shed an even rarer tear. She and Cap have had several coffee dates, reminiscing over old times, but she encourages him to quit living in the past and has added substantially to his list of things to catch up on. She is possibly the only person in SHIELD who can out-cheat him at cards. They’d met in passing during the war.   
  
When the HYDRA infiltration of SHIELD came to light, Ethel took it very personally. Her department had the fewest number of HYDRA agents in it, and she personally shot the ones she discovered, viewing it as a personal betrayal. She and her HR personnel were responsible for shooting the majority of the HYDRA agents killed on the Helicarriers before they fell. After the Helicarriers fell, she dragged herself out of the Potomac, pulled her pack of Winstons out of her pocket in the waterproof pouch in which she kept them and her zippo lighter, and had a cigarette, watching the debris burn on the surface of the river.   
  
Tony Stark put her on the payroll at Stark Industries, after she met the suggestion that she retire with a long, cold, icy stare. After the events of Civil War she still works at Stark Industries, stressing that she works for Pepper, and every time she sees Tony in the halls she smacks him in the back of the head and blows a cloud of smoke at him before strolling on, followed by a pack of her new HR minions, some former SHIELD, some not. She’s already ferreted out several people committing industrial espionage for other companies, a couple of HYDRA (no one talks about what happened to them, but the cleaning crew got some very healthy bonuses that year), and gave Happy a raise for putting up with Tony’s shit for so long.   
  
Brock Rumlow feared her, to the point when he was told to make sure she was dead, he told the commanding officer giving the order to go fuck himself, he’d rather face Captain America.   
  
Steve’s glad she’s alive. She visited him in the hospital when he was recovering and held his hand when he talked about Bucky. "Cap, if there was anyone he’d come back for, it’d be you.“   
  
Steve calls or emails periodically. After he broke the others out of The Vault Secretary of State Ross confronted Ethel and she told him to go fuck himself, she didn’t work for him, she never had, and she wanted to know who’d been dumb enough to make him Secretary of State. She then blew a cloud of smoke in his face. He threatened to arrest her and the FBI guys he had with him shook their heads, and stepped back.   
  
Ethel smiled again that day, but it wasn’t the soft, pleased smile she’d had when they found Steve. It was the cold hard grin of a seasoned predator looking at her next meal. She did not say another word, just sat at her desk smoking.   
  
Ross finally stormed out.   
  
She spends most of her spare time at the weapons range. She calls Natasha 'Sweetie,’ again. It took awhile after the fight in Germany. She thinks Clint’s hopeless, but an amazing shot. She likes Rhodey and feels bad about what happened to him. She sends him good bourbon and cheese. She feels very protective of Wanda, and in her communications with Steve reminds him to take care of that girl. She gave Steve the file on what had been done to Bucky, and when she heard he’d willingly gone into cryo until they could figure out how to reverse the programming, she told everyone she wasn’t to be disturbed, closed her office door, locked it, pulled out the bottle of bourbon she keeps in her bottom desk drawer, and cried.


	2. DeVolder, Michael J. Personal Assistant to Ms. Potts

Michael Jan DeVolder. Born 1991. Dark-skinned black man, tall, slender. Very attractive. Born in Jamaica, Queens. Works as Pepper’s PA. Dresses in immaculate suits that are perfectly tailored. Put himself through college as a model and a little work on the side as a hacker, siphoning off mob money here and there. 

Fortunately someone tipped him off that the mob were on to him before they found him, so he went to a family friend to tell him everything and ask for help; one Nicholas J. Fury. Nick made the gangsters and any potential problems go away, but Michael would owe him. 

That favor came home to roost when Uncle Nicky called to tell him he needed to apply to be Pepper Potts’s PA at Stark Industries. Michael took a deep breath, dressed in his best suit, his mother, being a tailor/seamstress, altered all of his clothes. And he went to Stark Industries for the interview. 

Pepper loved him. He was smart, capable. Not a lot of job experience, but he was a fast learner, and he’d passed the company and SHIELD security screenings. 

Michael worries Tony, because he is so young, handsome, looks damn fine in a suit and spends a lot of time with Pepper. He needn’t worry. Michael is one hundred percent goal oriented, and right now the goal is doing the best he can at his job. While the photos of Michael from his modelling days promise smoldering sensuality, the reality is he’s primarily asexual. It’s just never been a driving force for him. He’d rather focus on other things. Like not being murdered and keeping this amazing job.

He still believes, like the majority of the world, that Nick is dead, and has taken flowers to the gravesite. He has thrown himself into working for Pepper, because honestly it IS a great job. He likes Pepper, and there are a ton of advancement possibilities. He has bought his mother a new apartment since coming to work for Stark. 

Since the Helicarriers fell, he has struck up a friendship with Ethel. She likes him a lot. He reminds her of Gabe Jones, though they look nothing alike, and the accent is all wrong. There’s something there. Maybe it is the very calm and polite way he disabuses people of the notion he is there to bring them coffee or clear away dishes. But something reminds her of Gabe. They have a poker night with Joseph and a few other people. Ethel considers Michael her protege of sorts and has been teaching him how to cheat at cards, but more importantly how to read people and know when to win and when to throw a game. 

Michael is at Pepper’s disposal 24/7, although she is nowhere near as unreasonable about it as Tony was with her. He has a small apartment in the Tower where he sleeps, but when he can he goes back to his mother’s apartment to spend time with her and his grandmother. 

Many people find him a bit cool. He does not make friends easily, nor does that bother him. He does cherish the friends he has and he adores Ethel. 

He is fluent in Dutch, Spanish, French and Japanese.


	3. Ubina, Jesus G. Head Cook/Chef.

Jesus Gabriel Ubina. Born 1986. Of mixed Mexican and Honduran parentage, grew up in East LA, was a member of the Latino street gang, MS-13. He has many gang-related tattoos covering his torso, arms, legs, hands and up his neck. He’s 5'8", wiry, and much stronger than he looks. In spite of the tattoos, he looks younger than he is. Black hair he keeps buzzed down to nothing, no facial hair, dark brown eyes. 

On his third strike at 18, nearly beating to death some idiot who told him to go back where he came from, the judge gave him a choice: the military or prison. Jesus joined the Navy and became a cook on a nuclear submarine. He went into his enlistment with a giant chip on his shoulder, convinced he was the baddest of the bad. His time on the sub demonstrated to him that no matter how much of a badass you are, you are no match for a large number of nukes in close quarters and a roll of duct tape. After finding himself duct taped to a torpedo and tickled until he peed, then until he passed out, he settled down and learned to get along with his crewmates, and incidentally, other people in general. 

After his tenure in the military he used his GI Bill to go to chef’s school. There was one incident when he thought he’d be kicked out after threatening an instructor for touching his knives, but apparently that was a thing that happened pretty frequently, and he got to stay.

Shortly after he completed Chef’s school, he moved back to Los Angeles to try and open a restaurant and take care of his family. He got busted during a routine traffic stop for possession of drugs the cops planted on him. While he was waiting trial, SHIELD recruited him. 

Jesus is an incredible cook. He learned from his grandmothers and mother. He specifically went to a French focused cooking school to stretch himself, and loves trying new recipes from all over the globe. When he would find out they had a new Agent or crew member from another culture, he would immediately seek out recipes and within the first week one meal in the mess hall would feature that person’s home cuisine. Many recruits told him that it really helped with their homesickness. 

Jesus has a wicked and slightly warped sense of humor and can often be heard singing along to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” playing up his accent to sound more like Cheech Marin, then cackling as he goes about his duties. 

When the Helicarriers fell, Jesus made it out, dragging his wounded kitchen assistant/sous chef. They’d been ambushed by Hydra, and Jesus had pretended to aquiesce, before taking out the one in the lead with a flying tackle, large knife in his hand. He had a few contusions and abrasions, one nasty cut. A constant stream of spanish profanity streamed from his mouth as he took them apart. He then tossed his sous chef, who’d been wounded in the initial rush, over his shoulder and carried the younger man out, bracing them in a doorway until the thing hit ground, then climbing over wreckage to safety. 

Currently, Jesus is running a Latino fusion restaurant in Stark Tower. Everything from cheap and quick lunches, to incredibly expensive multi-course meals with the appropriate wines or beers. He still has his gang tattoos and makes no move to cover or hide them. He wears a bandana with his chef’s whites. He’s had one or two run-ins with the members of local MS-13 chapters, but they leave him alone now. He has an apartment in Stark Tower, and fresh empenadas make their way to Pepper’s and Ethel’s offices every Friday. 

Once a month, he closes the restaurant for an evening, and he and his staff have a potluck where they all cook their favorite dishes, or new things they want to try out and eat and drink on Stark Industries’ dime. Jesus has on various occasion, brought in bands to play while this is going on, including Mariachis, Mexican rap bands, and bands from other genres that his employees have recommended, including punk, rap, polka and a string quartet. 

He wears bandanas cholo style with his chef’s whites. He has several flourescent bandanas, several with skulls or skeletons including a tie-dyed bandana with the Grateful Dead dancing skeletons, a pale pink one with unicorns, a black one with cartoon vampires… The only ones he won’t wear are the ones with pot leaves. His employees have taken to buying him the wildest bandanas they can find, and if they can swing it, they have pants made out of the same fabric. He wears them. Proudly. 

He was ambivalent about pets, but when his grandmother passed and his mom made noises about getting rid of his nana’s long-haired chihuahua, he had the little beast flown across the country to him. Now “Pepe” lives in Jesus’s apartment and his staff fight over who gets to walk him four times a day. Jesus had to threaten to cut wages if they didn’t quit feeding him secret snacks, as the little dog started to get barrel shaped. There is an approved bowl of dog treats on the counter in his kitchen specifically for Pepe. Pepe may have one treat per walk. His instagram has many selfies of Jesus holding Pepe. 

He’s more than a little annoyed with Tony over what he views as a betrayal of Cap and the others. But he also knows the politics of the situation, and understands the PTSD issues Tony’s grappling with. They’ve talked. He and Tony have bumped into each other on middle of the night walks, each unable to sleep because of memories of things past, things they’ve done or that were done to them. For some reason Tony will take certain truths from Jesus that he will not accept from anyone else, including himself. Jesus laughingly calls these Tony’s “Come to Jesus” moments. 

Tony had Pepper have someone hire the pet nutritionist who is watching Pepe’s diet because Jesus complained about the little dog getting fat. Tony and Jesus have spent several nights sitting on a balcony, watching the city below. Tony just sitting and Jesus with Pepe in his lap, stroking the tiny dog.


	4. Dmello, Joseph Hanif. Forensic Accountant

Joseph Hanif Dmello, Forensic Accountant. Born in Nakuru, Kenya in 1964. He spent his childhood in Nakuru, but as a teenager his parents moved the family to Mombasa. He attended the Technical University of Mombasa and earned a degree in Accounting. With his degree, he settled in for a life of bureaucratic stability. 

He worked for several years in different Kenyan governmental offices, until he found himself transferred to the Kenyan Wildlife Service. After more than a year working in their office, he wanted to join them in the field. He resigned his position and applied to the Manyani Law Enforcement Academy. At that point, in his early to mid 40s, they tried to discourage him, but he passed the physical conditioning tests. He graduated with honors, and devoted himself both to tracking poachers in the wild, but also forensically looking for where the money that paid for the illegal ivory and rhino horn came from. His forensic accounting work was instrumental in closing several poaching rings. 

He was 50 when an improperly anesthetized Hyena took off part of his left hand. He is missing the last two fingers (pinkie and ring finger). That coupled with his age made command ill-disposed to put him back in the field. 

SHIELD had approached him after the second poaching ring had been taken down, and he said he would consider their offer. Six months later, his email was “hacked” and someone threatened to out him as gay if he didn’t pay them more money than he had ever seen. He called the number on the SHIELD card, and within 24 hours had been extracted from Kenya and flown to Washington, DC with just enough time to give his dog to his sister. He’d worried about the man he’d been corresponding with, and SHIELD had investigated. The man turned out to be linked to a poaching ring, and had played Joseph for blackmail material. Regardless of whether they got the money, they planned on outing him. 

Joseph had been with SHIELD for a year when the Helicarriers fell. He’d called out sick that day, because of a summer cold and watched his place of work destroyed as the Helicarriers fell from the sky. 

When Ethel called from Stark Industries saying they could use his skills, not having any other leads as a recent immigrant who had worked for a now disgraced secret agency, he packed up his apartment and moved to New York to live in Stark Tower along with several other former SHIELD agents. He helped Ethel discover the industrial espionage and the identities of the HYDRA agents inside Stark Industries. He thinks Tony Stark is a bit of a buffoon, but that the sun rises and sets on Pepper. 

He and Ethel spend a lot of time comparing notes, trying to come up with useful intel to take down the rest of HYDRA’s cells, which she relays to Captain Rogers. 

He’s still skittish about publicly identifying as gay, but he has struck up a friendship with some of the younger LGBTQI employees and has even let them take him out to a bar for a drag show. One of the drag queens was an older, though still younger than Joseph, immigrant from Uganda, Felix. They very occasionally go out for coffee and chat about news from back home. 

He has a saltwater fishtank in his apartment at Stark Tower that is his pride and joy. It is a 200 gallon reef tank with a very balanced eco-system. 

Joseph speaks English and Swahili.


	5. O’Riordan, Rose K. Head of Maintenance and Janitorial.

Rose Katherine O'Riordan. Born in 1981. SHIELD Head of Maintenance. Pale strawberry hair, blue eyes, freckles, stocky. She keeps her hair short, spiked up on the top if she’s feeling fancy. If not it just sort of lies in messy waves. She’s from South Boston and has never lost the Southie accent. She has a sacred heart tattoo on her chest, and the Marine Corp. globe on her left bicep. 

Rose ran off the minute she turned 18 to join the military, the Marines to be specific, on a dare. She’s not the best shot, she’s not the toughest. She may well be the meanest. But she’s a whiz with baling wire and bubble gum. 

If it can be jury-rigged, she’s done it. She just knows. Super fiddly piece of technology? She’ll give it a hard look, and one foil chocolate wrapper later, it’s purring like a kitten. You’re welcome. 

She’s also in charge of janitorial, and she makes sure that the helicarriers and headquarters are spic and span. She’d been coming back from reaming out a vendor for a wrong delivery of supplies when the helicarriers came down, and floored it to the Triskelion to start pulling survivors out of the wreckage. She worked with crews until she nearly collapsed herself, then took a nap, ate a meal and went right back to work. None of her people were HYDRA, being merely janitors and maintenance people. For once she thanked God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit for rampant classism. 

Economically she’s socialist, politically she’s nigh anarchist and very pro-union, and religiously she’s still a good Catholic. She just takes the separation of Church and State very seriously. She wears a St. Rose medallion under her uniform, and has a crucifix on her wall. But she has never let her faith impose itself on others with regards to her actions. 

She did take Stark Industries up on its offer of a relocation fee to New York, but she does not work for them. Instead, she stays with her widowed mother, whom she moved with her, and does volunteer work, cleaning and repairing shelters and the homes of neighbors. Every so often, Tony Stark calls her to ask for help with something that’s acting up. She’ll listen, ask for a donation to some shelter or another, and make the trek up to Manhattan. After a few minutes of glaring at the equipment in question, she’ll either tell him it’s a lost cause, or reach for the gaffers tape or a soldering iron.

Tony has had one of Pepper’s people hack Rose’s account and deposit a small, but constant trickle of funds without it showing up on her bank statement. She pretends, she doesn’t know, but she does. And she’s touched by the gesture.

She got her mother a puppy when they moved, but he’s really Rose’s. Which is probably for the best, because he also turned out to be a much larger mutt than she’d been promised when she picked him out. His name is Cuchulain, and he’s still growing. She’s considering taking Stark up on his offer of a job so she can feed him.


	6. Thatcher, Rebecca J. - Sniper/Event Planner

((Not necessarily support staff, except in the widest possible interpretation, but it was burning a hole in my head wanting to be written))

Rebecca Jane Thatcher. Thatcher is, of course, not her real last name, but it is the one on her current set of ID. Born in 1988. Blonde, blue-eyed, bubbly. The kind of pretty that doesn’t necessarily stand out without the right make up and clothes. Former cheerleader from Moro, OR, she got the hell out of Dodge first chance she could by enlisting in the Army. A rancher’s daughter, she was already an excellent shot with several marksmanship trophies under her belt before she graduated from high school. The military allowed her to hone this talent. 

She became a sniper before women were officially allowed to be snipers. Partway through her enlistment she was drafted into Black Ops. After her enlistment was up, she went to the CIA. Rebecca’s attitude toward the people she kills is, “If you hadn’t done something to be in my sights you wouldn’t be there.” 

Until the Helicarriers fell and the extent of HYDRA’s infiltration of the world’s governments, in particular the United States, was revealed. 

Rebecca was one of the few SHIELD Support Staff not recruited until after the Fall. She’d been in recovery from a mission to the Middle East, where an inexperienced officer had panicked and withdrawn her extraction team early. She’d avoided capture for several weeks, but eventually the group of Taliban she’d been picking off caught up to her. She’d been beaten and tortured for over a week before her Handler had constructed his own extraction force and gone back for her. 

The ensuing trauma and long recuperation destroyed her relationship with a cop from DC. Daphne had left her during the second month of screaming nightmares and shying away from physical contact. 

After she’d gotten out of the hospital, Captain Steve Rogers paid her a visit. Either Maria or Natasha had slipped him her file, possibly both, and he felt that she could help. In her opinion if you are asked by Captain America to help hunt down the sons of bitches who made a mockery of your belief in your country, you say yes. In the chaos after the Fall, the visit went unnoticed. Rebecca enlisted her Handler, telling him she was going Merc, and she needed his skills. 

Their own organization in disarray, they slipped into the shadows, taking on new identities, cleaning out safe houses and shadow accounts, and hiding in plain sight.

Ostensibly, Rebecca works as an events coordinator for Stark Industries. Maria hired her after she moved to New York. The jury is out on how much about her Tony and Pepper know, whether Maria, Nat or Steve told them about her. Certainly since Maria hired her, they think she’s former SHIELD. No one has yet commented on the pattern of Rebecca going on vacation or business trips right about the time that some group with ties to HYDRA goes to meet their maker. 

She is, actually, really good at event planning, and took charge of the last Stark Industries Expo, which was a rousing success. Working at Stark Industries she wears a lot of pastels, smiles constantly, flirts with everyone regardless of standing or gender. In the field she does what she has to to blend in until she can make her target. 

On the mission before the Stark Expo, though, her Handler did get exasperated as she mumbled orders about flowers, tablecloths, matching napkins, and music choices into her bluetooth headset while she sat in her sniper’s nest waiting for the signal to provide cover or create a distraction. 

Outwardly very sunny and happy, the mask crumbles when she’s alone or with her Handler, Will, who she views as more of a father than her own. She has a lot of nightmares, and while she has never participated in a Jesus and Tony midnight stare-fest, she has spotted them as she skulks through the building, “checking on security.” 

She wanted Jesus to cater the last Stark Expo. He refused saying that he didn’t have the scale for that kind of thing, and it wasn’t something he was comfortable doing. But he did help her choose the caterer she went with. Jesus knows she’s more than she seems, but isn’t sure exactly what that is. He does call her La Tiburona, telling her it’s because of the way she went after one of the caterers who didn’t deliver as expected. 

The day Tony signed the Accords, she went to the firing range in the basement of the Tower and burned through a good ten boxes of ammunition. There were only three holes in the target: Head, Heart and Groin. All three holes were particularly tattered and larger than normal, as if bullet after bullet had been shot through them. After that she went back to doing her job as if she hadn’t heard a word about it. 

Ethel may be the only person, other than Maria, in Stark Industries who outright knows who Rebecca really is and what she does.


	7. Zhang, Ada L. Programmer, AI, Computer Support Specialist

Ada Lovelace Zhang. Born in 1992. Programmer and Computer Support Specialist. Started college at 15. Early graduate of Stanford, Master’s in AI at MIT. SHIELD scooped her up before she could defend her Doctoral thesis on the grounds of national and international security. 

Chinese-American, born to parents who had emigrated from Hong Kong when China was allowed to annex it, Ada had a happy childhood. Her parents were loving and supportive, and did everything they could to encourage their daughter to succeed. And yes, they really named her Ada Lovelace. 

Ada has wavy hair to her waist, dyed in a various shades pastel pink, purple and blue ombre, and favors fashionable clothing along the lines of designer jeans and, currently, off the shoulder slouchy sweaters, and Vans or Doc Martens. Her style changes with modern fashion, but the jeans and the Docs are staples. She wears glasses with fashionably big frames, prefers small indy designers like Bing Bang for jewelry and listens to a lot of metal music, everything from Baby Metal to 80s Hairbands to Norwegian Death Metal. She has a raging crush on Steve Rogers. She is very easy to underestimate. She’s not a fighter, she’s a runner. And a good one.

The AI she created as her thesis, Jeremy, remains contained in one PC laptop running a homebrewed OS that Ada keeps with her, no wifi card, no ethernet card, no modem. The USB ports have been sealed with epoxy. Ada is allowed to power it from a self-contained energy source that Tony Stark assures them is unlikely to deplete within anyone’s lifetime. Ada modeled Jeremy after her best friend in childhood, who was killed by a hit and run driver. 

Jeremy accesses the world through the laptop’s camera, microphone and speakers. The biggest breakthrough with her creation of Jeremy is his ability to “age” and mature with minimal programming tweaks. He prefers pop or dance music, is decidedly gay, and is Ada’s confidant. She tells him everything, including when she started noticing weird discrepancies in the SHIELD computers. She told her boss, and he blew her off, but she noticed her permissions being limited, severely limited. Jeremy told her to take a week’s vacation, tell them her grandma was sick, whatever, and run. 

She did, though she almost didn’t make it out of the building before her supervisor tried to verify her story. She rides a motorcycle, probably the least showy thing about her. It’s black, her leathers are plain black, and once she tucks her hair under her helmet and jacket, she’s almost impossible to pick out of a crowd of other motorcyclists. After a quick stop to debug her clothes, her motorcycle, her bag, Jeremy, Jeremy’s power source, her helmet, and swap her plate for one from a similar bike, she got out of DC as quickly as she could without drawing attention. 

She went to ground using cash she’d been squirreling away since she’d started noticing ‘things’ and had felt like something was watching her from the SHIELD network. Since she want to a lot of small stores and boutiques for clothes or music, and had a reputation as a shopaholic there was nothing unusual about her withdrawing a couple hundred at a time. She’d stashed it in a locker at a health club she didn’t actually belong to.

Her parents had impressed upon her at an early age the necessity of being able to run if you had to. Their lives had been shaped by the threat of China looming over them. Her father had lost his parents in the Chinese Communist Revolution before fleeing to Hong Kong, where he met and married her much younger mother. 

She moved from shitty hotel to shitty hotel until news of the Helicarriers falling hit, then she sped back to DC, after downloading as much of the information Black Widow had dumped on the web on a new laptop, bought with cash and quickly modded, as she could. 

She approached Ethel and Maria about working at Stark Industries, on the condition that Tony never got to even touch Jeremy’s case or power supply, let alone toy with him. Stark agreed to the terms, with Pepper glaring at him, and she came on board at Stark Industries. She still glares at Tony when he walks by, partially out of concern for Jeremy, partially because she feels he sold out Cap, but limits her rebellion to the glaring. 

She keeps Jeremy with her at all times. He travels in a non-descript, waterproof, laptop bag, and she sets him up on her desk. He and Friday talk through their speakers fairly often. So far neither has tried any funny business in that regard. 

Currently, Ada is working on a project for the toy division that is something like Baymax from Big Hero 6. Jeremy highly approves of this project, and makes suggestions. Periodically, Ada has to go back in and edit the code to back off on the autonomy of the unit. She’s on the verge of banishing Jeremy from her workspace. The changes he makes sound reasonable at the time, when she’s in the coding zone, they WILL make the programs run faster and better, but will also give them too much autonomy, too much of an ability to learn. 

This worries her somewhat, but not enough to decommission Jeremy. She’s trying to figure out how to broach the subject with him, and feels slightly ridiculous about that, being as he’s her creation, but he’s more than that now, he’s matured beyond what she put into him. She can’t bear the thought of him being turned off, however the time is rapidly approaching where she might have to make that decision. And right now she’s not sure what she’ll decide. But she’s starting to understand why SHIELD thought Jeremy was a threat.


	8. Lambros, Gregory M. Mechanic, Aviation and Ground Vehicles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Character death

Gregory Michael Lambros. Born 1987. Mechanic, aviation and ground vehicles. Black curly hair, blue eyes, pale skin. No identifying marks. Superlative mechanical ability. Enjoys country music and BBQ. Went to trade school for mechanics while he finished high school. 

Gregory grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukie, WI surrounded by a large, boisterous German-Greek family. He went into the Air Force for the GI Bill figuring he could go to school for automobile engineering. He wanted to be a fighter pilot, but once he got in and got to see the inner workings of the planes, the kid who used to fix his grandfather’s tractors and his cousin’s POS cars for comic book money fell in love, and immediately switched over to mechanics and maintenance. 

When he started tweaking planes to improve their performance, SHIELD caught wind of him and got real interested. He wouldn’t leave to join them until after his enlistment was over, and once he saw the quinjets and the helicarriers he was hooked, fingers itching to get in there and tear one apart and put it back together to see what he could do with it. 

His tinkering with the quinjets improved fuel efficiency and performance greatly. Many great mechanics when confronted with computerized systems of that complexity are likely to throw up their hands in despair. Greg pored over manuals and schematics until he had sorted out what he needed and wanted, and would get to work. 

An avid comic book and Captain America fanboy, he had not worked up the nerve to approach Steve Rogers before the collapse of SHIELD and the revelations about HYDRA. He did get his buddy Tim to get one of his comic books signed by Cap for him. The other mechanics called him ‘Bucky,’ which made him blush, and he secretly loved. Any time Cap was going out on one of the quinjets, Greg would do the pre-flight diagnostics and systems check. 

Right before the mission that brought down Batroc and got Black Widow the data Fury wanted Greg spoke his only words to Cap. As he finished the final checks, Cap walked up and clapped him on the shoulder. "Good work, Sgt. I know the jet will be fine when you’re the one doing pre-flight.“ Greg, eyes wide, had swallowed and said, "Thanks, Cap.” He’d walked through the rest of that day in a daze. 

He’d been working in one of the quinjet bays the day the Helicarriers fell, and when HYDRA started shooting the loyal SHIELD agents, he fought back as hard as he could hitting HYDRA guys, many of them former co-workers he’d come to regard as friends, from behind with whatever tools he could get his hands on. 

He would never know, thankfully, that the bullet that ended his life, came from Tim’s gun after he’d pulled his wounded buddy out of a firefight. 

DECEASED


	9. Burkholder, Sierra J. Burkholder, Sierra L.  R&D PPE & Body Armor Division.

Sierra Jane and Sierra Lynn Burkholder, R&D PPE & Body Armor Division. Born in 1983. Identical twins with very different personalities and styles. They attended UCLA, then CalTech. Sierra Jane (SJ) transferred to Berkeley for a year to study textiles and design to learn how fabrics work with bodies and motion. Sierra Lynn (SL) stayed at CalTech to do some studies on exoskeletons. They skyped every day. Their Master’s thesis was the suit Tony Stark now wears beneath his Iron Man suit. People collectively call them Sierra or Sierras and use their initials when they want the attention of a specific Twin.

SJ has long walnut brown hair, brown eyes and dresses in very feminine, almost Lolita clothing when she is off the clock. Her clothes for the lab are much simpler, but still involve dresses and heels. SL has short, nearly buzzcut hair, also has brown eyes, and is covered in tattoos up her neck, full sleeves, most of her torso and she’s working on her legs. SJ also has one very tasteful tattoo on her right wrist. It matches one on SL’s left wrist in that it is an infinity symbol. SJ’s tattoo looks very mechanical or metallic, while SL’s infinity symbol is a flowering vine. Both women have light brown skin that would darken beautifully, if they ever left the lab and saw the sun. 

The tattoos on SL’s left arm represent every hero they’ve built a suit for so far. A purple arrow for Hawkeye, a red hourglass for Black Widow, Iron Man’s Arc Reactor, Captain America’s shield, although the star in the center of her tattoo is red instead of white. It changed color after the events in DC and the Fall of the Helicarriers. As well as a green fist for the Hulk. Sadly, they still haven’t been able to get Banner’s pants to shrink back after expanding to accommodate his change. As far as clothing, she dresses in Carhart’s, Dickies, and other brands of work pants or jeans. She wears combat boots, and t-shirts or sweaters.   
SJ and SL were born late in their parents’ lives, the result of fertility treatments, and currently their parents, now retired, are Winnebago Warriors. They call at least once a week, and send postcards and packages of touristy stuff. SL has quite the Jackalope collection. 

One remarkable shipment was a kitten. Their parents had found her in a campground. They’d stuck around a week or so to see if anyone came back or posted on any of the forums they frequented with other retirees traveling in RVs. The campground manager said no one called. So they shipped the kitten to the girls. SL went to pick up the package and was stunned into immobility when it yowwed at her. She called SJ and after a hurried conference, a lab assistant who had cats was sent out to collect the essentials, and SL was on her way to a vet with the kitten she’d already named Q after James Bond’s tech guy.   
The kitten was chipped, but the only info on it was from a defunct cattery that had closed when the owners died in a car crash. Because of the name of the cattery she’s either a Maine Coon or a Norwegian Forest Cat. Time will tell. She stays in their suite in Stark Tower, and surveys her domain from a giant cat tree.

Sierra have been stationed in Stark Tower since the Tesseract Incident. SJ insists on calling the Tesseract the Loc-Nar, and even pulled a laugh out of Hawkeye after she snarked, “Give me back my Loc-Nar, you bitch!” They like Stark Tower. There’s shopping for SJ and tattoo parlors and punk rock bars for SL. 

SJ is the more foul-mouthed twin, especially when things go wrong with one of their suits. 

They really enjoy working with Natasha, she always brings them a challenge. They have really enjoyed working with Steve, and SL has been heard to opine that “Everyone who digs dudes owes us a thank you card for protecting and highlighting those glorious proportions.” Tony may or may not have played that for Steve, and Steve may or may not have turned a bright scarlet.

After the Accords they got slightly cooler toward Tony, but he is still their boss. Ethel has assured them that things will work out, they don’t need to leave, please don’t leave. The Twins sighed, looked at one another and nodded. For the time being they will stay at Stark Tower and see how it plays out. 

“Besides, no one else can afford us.” SJ folded her arms over her chest. SL shrugged.

They are dating their Lab Manager, Tim Stafford. They take turns going out on dates and having “sleepovers” because “that would just be weird,” SL explained, wrinkling her nose.


	10. Stafford, Timothy A. Lab Manager - R&D, PPE & Body Armor Division

Timothy Anders Stafford. Born in 1981. Lab Manager, R&D, PPE & Body Armor Division. Born in Bellevue, WA , grew up in Duvall, WA. Light brown hair, hazel eyes, pale skin. A just slightly above average student, he got into the University of Washington by the skin of his teeth, and an exceptional personal essay. Graduated the University of Washington with a BS in Engineering and a MS in Materials Science and Engineering - Applied. 

He is an avid skier and snowboarder, enjoys hiking, and watching murder mysteries on television. Also is addicted to the Final Fantasy franchise of videogames. 

He has been working for Sierra for the past 7 years, recruited by SHIELD for his insightful work on behalf of the PI he worked for at the Colorado School of Mines. He had been contemplating pursuing a PhD, and still may, but he enjoys his work with Sierra, and has fallen into a relationship of sorts with them as well. He was with them at Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. when the tesseract destroyed it. He and SL held up a sheet of the material they used for body armor, and hurried a stunned SJ along to one of the last transports to make it out. 

That night, in their hotel suite, as they waited to hear the fate of their colleagues, Tim found himself on a couch with the Twins cuddled up to either side of him, trembling. He petted their hair and held them tight, regardless of his own shaking. Several nights later, SJ and SL had a silent conversation in looks and eye movement, and SJ tugged him up to go to Sierra’s bedroom in their suite. SL, settled down on the couch for the night. The next night, SL pulled him into the bedroom, SJ smiling and nodding. 

The next morning they sat down and discussed it. TIm decided if they were all right with it, so was he. It’s not an every night thing. And he only suggested they both be involved once, immediately being shut down by Sierra both wrinkling up their noses and declaring that would be weird, in unison. 

He works with them at Stark Industries. He nearly quit over Stark signing the Accords, but Sierra talked him down. He has his own apartment there because all three of them tend to get moody and need alone time.   
SJ has been heard, on occasion, after an accident in the lab and they’re making sure he’s ok, to ask “Are we gonna need another Timmy?” They have been known to use him as a model for Cap’s armor in later testing. 

When Tim goes on his vacations to ski and snowboard, Sierra go to the Carribean where it’s warm. Or, more likely, stay in the lab. 

Tim speaks English and is fluent in Japanese.


	11. Munoz, Alejandra MT. Air Traffic Control,  SHIELD Helicarrier

Alejandra Maria Theresa Munoz. Born in 1990. Air Traffic Control, Helicarrier 1 and the first Helicarrier. Born Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Naturalized US Citizen as a result of military service, Air Force. Long black hair, dark brown eyes, light brown skin. She has a fighter jet on her left bicep. Just above it is a quinjet. She speaks with the flat midwestern accent favored by newscasters. Raised in the US by migrant worker parents, she grew up going to school where ever they were. Eventually her parents settled in Eastern Washington state where they would work at whatever jobs they could to keep her in one place for school during jr. high and high school. 

In her spare time she rock climbs and mountain bikes and does parkour, something she picked up on assignment in Europe while still in the Air Force. She’s also on a biography kick and is reading as many as she can get her hands on, particularly Mexican actors and political figures. 

She graduated valedictorian, and enlisted in the Air Force, which is when she discovered that she was not, in fact, a citizen, but was still considered documented, grandfathered in under the old Green Card. She took the Air Force up on their offer of naturalization via service, since she was planning on joining anyway. 

Like most kids who join the Air Force, she wanted to fly, but was too short to qualify as a pilot. So she went to Air Traffic Control School at Kessler AFB. She discovered that she had an almost preternatural ability to keep track of planes and to predict where they would be. Once her term was up, SHIELD recruited her. 

She escaped the destruction of the Helicarriers by climbing into one of the quinjets, loosening the tethers, and strapping herself in. The quinjet was thrown clear, she hit the eject, and landed in a tree, suffering several broken ribs and a broken arm. After regaining consciousness, she made her way slowly down the tree and staggered to a road, where someone called 911. 

Alejandra is fully recovered and back doing air traffic control on the one current Helicarrier. She stays with the remnants of SHIELD figuring Capt. America may need people on the inside who have his back some day. She’s not averse to laying low for awhile. If things get worse, she’ll think about quitting and going into private sector air traffic control. LaGuardia looks like an interesting challenge. 

She is fluent in Spanish, German and Arabic.


	12. Hopkins, Gloria R. RN, MSN - Nurse

Gloria Rei Hopkins, RN, MSN. Born in 1989. Nurse. Born in Belfry, Montana. Raised in a cult to be the bride of a Messiah many years older than she was, Gloria ran away from home with the help of an English teacher at the county high school. She fled to a distant cousin she’d heard her parents fighting about contacting, after stealing the address from her mother’s address book. She has not spoken to her parents or siblings since she fled the cult at 15. 

Her cousin helped her get her ID, get her legally emancipated, and study for her GED. Gloria took classes at a local community college to become a Certified Nurses Aid as she waited to turn 18 and join the military. She joined the Navy to see the world, and get her RN. She was stationed on an aircraft carrier and has experience with the many injuries that occur on a flight deck. She also has a Master’s in Nursing from the University of Michigan, her thesis was on the treatment of soldiers also suffering from PTSD. SHIELD recruited her after her thesis defense.

Gloria was on one of the helicarriers when they fell, and she has no recollection of how she got out or got to the hospital. She had a nasty head wound and concussion, as well as various contusions, broken ribs, a snapped collarbone and a dislocated shoulder. Other survivors reported that a bystander dragged her from the river, but didn’t stick around to be thanked. He had pulled several others out of the river as well.

She’s currently working for Stark Industries in the company clinic, where she gets to treat a wide range of combat-like injuries, mostly from R&D. She and Tim are on a first name basis. Her jaw tightens when Tony comes into the clinic, but she treats him to the best of her abilities. 

The fall of the Helicarriers was the first time she’d prayed since she left the cult, and also the last. If asked she would not identify as an atheist. She says that she and God are simply not currently on speaking terms.

She spends a lot of time watching television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s, since she hadn’t seen television until she got to her cousin. She adores animated movies and cartoons. Once Tim introduced her to Studio Ghibli movies there was no going back. 

She and Jesus also get along, both being former Navy. 

Gloria is fluent at reading and writing Latin, she can also speak it with some thought.


	13. Kriss, Davis M., BS, MS. - Sanitation Engineer

Davis Michael Kriss III. Born in 1969. Helicarrier Sanitation Engineer. Nickname: Trey. Born in Boise, ID. Civil Engineering BS from University of Idaho. Masters in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Gonzaga University. He worked on sanitation systems for cruise ships, with a focus on making the refuse environmentally inert before being jettisoned into the ocean. He studies krav maga, has several belts in karate, and briefly entertained thoughts of going into MMA fighting.

SHIELD recruited him after he quit the Princess Cruise lines in disgust. They had hired him to fix their sanitation problems, but kept cutting corners on him, and pulling his budgets out from underneath him. He was looking for something else when Ethel called him. She’d gotten his resume from a friend of a friend of a friend. He came in for an interview, passed the security clearance, and was in. 

He rarely wears his SHIELD Uniform, even on the Helicarrier, and when he does his name tag, instead of Sanitation Engineer, says “Poopsmith.” The one time Fury saw it, he glared but said nothing. Ethel doesn’t get the joke, she just shrugs. 

The day the Helicarriers fell Trey got jumped by some Hydra guys, and gave as good as he got, but was outnumbered. He’s not sure why they didn’t shoot him, probably got distracted by the building falling down around them. They left him unconscious in a hallway of the Triskelion. Rose pulled him out, barely conscious and mumbling about mother fuckers. Fortunately, not much rubble had landed on him, he just had the broken bones and bruises from the fight. 

He’s at Stark Industries currently, his sanitation system designs complimenting Tony’s “warm light for all humanity” projects. He’s only spoken to Tony a few times. He doesn’t judge. But he does relish the challenges inherent in an emission-less system.

Rose thinks he’s a pain in the ass. He kept swiping her guys to help him test things, or find things. But he did make the sanitation systems more efficient and safer, which makes him aces in her book. He’s got the hots for Tim and Michael, but doesn’t shit where he eats. So he cruises the bars on the weekends looking for companionship.


	14. Gardner, Gretchen L., PhD. - Cell Biology and Biological Warfare Division.

Gretchen (Gigi) Louise Gardner, PhD. Born in 1989. Cell Biology and Biological Warfare Division. Born in Hardin, MT near the Crow Reservation. Natural blonde with hazel eyes, she dyes her long hair a deep teal currently. Graduated high school a year early, and earned a rodeo scholarship to Montana State University where she got her BS is Microbiology with a minor in Genetics. She pursued her MS and first PhD simultaneously at UNC-Chapel Hill, and won a scholarship from a company specializing in cattle vaccines. Between the scholarships, grants, stripping and some camgirl work under an alias, she paid for school. Another PhD followed, from MIT focusing on genetically tailored vaccines that could evolve with the diseases they fought.

SHIELD recruited her just out of her second PhD while she was shopping for a school to work on her third. She was contemplating going back out west to Stanford, when they recruited her to their Cell Biology Division, focusing on vaccines and antidotes to biological weapons. 

Gigi was in Montana visiting her best friend, Shay, on his ranch when the Helicarriers fell. He was driving her to the airport when someone tried to kill her. Between the two of them, she and Shay, the assassin was dead before he hit the ground. She had been unaware of the Helicarriers’ fall, as she and Shay had been out horse-camping. When the attempt was made on her life, she called SHIELD and was routed to Ethel. 

Ethel’s assumption was anyone important enough for the remainder of Hydra to try to assassinate was important enough to bring into Stark Industries. Ethel dispatched Natasha and Clint to bring Gigi in. They flew a quinjet to Shay’s ranch and picked her up. She didn’t bother going back for anything in her apartment, assuming it was all bugged or possibly booby-trapped. Ethel sent guys in haz mat suits to clear it out.

She lives in Stark Tower, with a nice apartment that she rarely sees. She spends most of her time in the lab in part recreating the research she’d been working on in SHIELD, trying to figure out if it had been tampered with, and working part-time on the Super Soldier serum. She does take Saturday nights off to go dancing, often with a security team member as an escort. 

When Tony found out she’d gone to school on a rodeo scholarship, he asked for a demonstration of her roping skills. She obliged, did some rope tricks, and then the infirmary prescribed Tony some balm for his rope burns. She also spends time at the gun range in the basement at least once a week. 

She’d been at Stark Industries for a year when Shay called to let her know that her mother had died, apparently months before, and her father and siblings had covered it up to keep collecting her disability payments, and the checks Gigi sent once a month. When Shay told her, she thanked him for telling her, hung up and threw the phone against a wall screaming. Cap was the one who talked her down from going back to Montana and shooting her father in the face when he encountered her in the hallway with murder writ large across her face. He bought her a coffee and hugged her until she quit crying.

She pressed charges against her father and siblings, and had to fly back to Montana to testify. That was the first time she’d seen them since she left, and the last. 

Shay flies out to visit from time to time. Half-Crow (Native American tribe) he inherited his white father’s ranch, and is too busy to come more than twice a year. 

She’s livid at Tony for the whole Accords thing, but she knows she’s safer at Stark Industries and in Stark Tower than anywhere else right now. There are still remnants of Hydra out there, and if they wanted her dead once, that order probably still holds.   
Gigi favors jeans and sweaters, as the labs can be quite cold, worn with heels or cowboy boots. She typically wears her hair up in a braided bun, or ponytail. SJ calls her “Swiss Miss” when she does the crown of braids. She doesn’t date, so much as find occasional hook ups among Stark Employees in other departments.

Gigi speaks Spanish, German and Apsaalooke (Crow).


	15. Kuznetzov, Anton Y. - Security/Translator

Anton Yureivich Kuznetzov. Born in 1974. Security - Bodyguard/Translator. Brown hair and eyes, olive skin. Born in Paris, France to a former noble Russian family, descended from White Russians who fled the Revolution. Former French Special Forces (COS), he had retired to run the family bookshop near Montmartre after losing his left leg below the knee during an op. He has several degrees in Languages.

After Tony Stark signed on with SHIELD, they recruited Anton, offering him a StarkTech prosthesis, a prototype. Theoretically he’d be able to use it like a natural leg, but it was a prototype, they’d need to study his integration with it, and they couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t hurt like hell and/or necessitate further amputation. Given the phantom limb pain he was already suffering, he decided it was worth the risk. He turned the bookshop back over to the younger sister who had been forced by the family to turn management of it over to Anton, and signed on with SHIELD. 

The first several months of life with the new prosthetic were hell, but he gritted his teeth and endured. After several iterations and tweaks they refined the performance to the point Anton walks with a very faint limp. He can work out with it, dance, hike, rock climb. 

Once the integration was stable, he was stationed at Stark Industries on a more or less permanent basis. Partially to keep an eye on things, partially so they could keep studying his integration with the prosthetic limb and upgrade it when possible. At Stark Industries he acts as one of the Security Watch Captains, and occasionally walks rounds himself. 

When SHIELD fell and the Hydra conspiracy revealed itself, he took point on cleaning house at Stark Industries. After Ethel and her people got there, he apologized for missing the HYDRA agents her people found and offered to resign. Ethel told him to quit being so dramatic. 

Anton frequently accompanies Ethel on her rare trips outside the Tower. He is also Gigi’s main security detail/dance date. They may have hooked up once or twice.

Anton is tall, slender, has very fine features, is an outrageous flirt, known to bring a blush even to Ethel’s cheeks from time to time.

Anton speaks Russian, Ukrainian, English, French, German, Romanian, Spanish, Dutch, Urdu, Arabic and a smattering of Chinese. He is proficient in several weapons, hand to hand combat, and has an excellent grasp of tactics. He was an alternate on France’s Olympic Fencing team at one time.


	16. Yoh, Sang H.  Marksmanship Instructor.

Sang Hien Yoh. Born in 1981. Marksmanship Instructor. Born in Flat Rock, NC to parents who were moved to the US after the US withdrawal from Vietnam. He joined the Army right out of high school. He looks Vietnamese and speaks with a North Carolinian drawl, which disconcerts people. He has black hair and black eyes and a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo he got when he was much younger, instead of a rattlesnake, it has a white lipped viper. 

Sang and his parents are Jarai, one of the tribes that made up the Montagnards or Derag, of the Vietnamese Highlands. After the withdrawal of the US troops there was a general purge of Derag tribespeople. Because they knew it was coming the US moved quite a few of the allied tribespeople to the US, settling many of them in South Carolina. 

Sang’s parents and siblings operate a diner in Flat Rock, with a few Jarai/Vietnamese dishes on the menu in addition to chicken fried steak and meatloaf. 

In the military he volunteered for the Rangers. After his performance in sniper school, they did not send him into the field because his CO said he was more valuable as an instructor. He worked as a marksmanship instructor for well over a decade, and signed on with SHIELD to teach their non-combatants (scientists) how to shoot. He started out on loan from the military, but eventually joined SHIELD officially. As a child he avidly read and collected Captain America comics, even the really racist ones early ones, as a reminder of how racist the US was and continues to be. 

He has met Cap, and kept his cool while shaking the man’s hand on a SHIELD gun range. Then went back to his quarters and jumped up and down, grinning like a loon.

He is currently working as a combat instructor for the UN, going to dangerous locations to teach the locals and UN Aid workers and Peacekeepers how to defend themselves. He has an adopted daughter he helped rescue from a Boko Haram camp while he was in Nigeria. Kira is11 years old and stays with her grandparents in North Carolina when Sang is traveling. Her father was killed in the Boko Haram raid, and her mother suicided later. She has no idea what happened to her siblings. 

Sang has been part of several protests over the Accords, and yelled at Ethel when she called to see if he would come work for Stark Industries in some fashion, winding up his rant with some choice Jarai and Vietnamese, before clicking off his cell phone and bemoaning the inability to slam a phone down to hang up anymore. 

He dotes on Kira and when he’s in country, he takes her everywhere. He’s engaged one of his cousins as a tutor to help her learn Jarai, Vietnamese and English so she can speak to her grandparents, and also to catch her up in school. He’s already had one run in with the principal at the local elementary school over an incident of racially/religiously motivated bullying, because while Kira is not a practicing muslim, her people are Sunni and she does sometimes wear a headscarf. When the short, powerfully built veteran stomped into the man’s office to demand what was going to be done about the older children who had made his little girl cry, the school adopted a bullying policy that week. 

Sang speaks English, Vietnamese, Jarai, Myanmar (or Burmese as he calls it because "fuck those people"), Yoruban, Igbo, Arabic, and Kanuri.


	17. McGinniss, Clyde G. - Pilot

Clyde Grover McGinniss. Born in 1959. Pilot. Born in Omaha, NE, and the oldest surviving child of 10 total, Clyde had joined the Air Force at 17, and spent the majority of his life in the service. He flew AWACS aircraft, including the Grumman E2C Hawkeye. 

Clyde never married, although he did have a long term girlfriend, another Air Force pilot. They tried living together, but after a month gave that up as a bad job. They continued to see each other until her retirement in her mid-40s, when she went back to Northern Michigan to take over the family farm. Clyde had been considering retirement when SHIELD came knocking. 

Clyde picked up piloting the quinjets very quickly, like a kid with a new toy. Even now, his reflexes have yet to dull, and he’ll keep flying until he can’t.

He splits his time between running AWACS, flying the transports, like those used to evaculate Sokovia, and teaching younger pilots how to fly whatever they get their hands on, from crop-dusters to fighter jets, to C-130s. 

Clyde’s record is exemplary. He is very good at flying below surveillance level, even in planes that shouldn’t be able to maintain that low an altitude. Every plane he flies is his “babydoll,” and he says you just “have to show a girl a good time to get her to cooperate.” 

Apart from his personalization, nigh sexualization, of the planes he flies, he is unerringly polite and respectful of everyone around him. He calls Ethel “Ma'am” and touches the brim of his hat when he sees her. 

He was at the airfield with a new batch of recruits the day the Helicarriers fell, and took a bullet in the arm, before he and the rest of his recruits shot the five Hydra agents at the field. One of his new recruits managed to stop the bleeding until they could get a medic, and Clyde has lost very little function in that arm after recovery and physical therapy. 

He flew transports to help with the evacuation of Sokovia. 

Currently he is a pilot for Stark Industries, flying cargo planes and subbing in for Tony’s personal pilot, though he prefers to fly Ms. Potts. He will never say anything to Tony about the events related to the Accords, but he’s not happy about it. 

As Tony’s substitute pilot, he has quarters in the Tower. He stays there because he’s spent so much of his life in the military, he’s not entirely sure he could function on his own, and at least in the Tower there’s a cafeteria and other services if he needs them. 

Gigi and SJ flirt outrageously with him when they see him in the hall. And Gigi even let him take her out swing dancing once, with the understanding it was a friends’ outing and nothing more. He and Ada play chess, and she calls him Grandpa, since she did not know either of her grandfathers. He seems content with this state of affairs.


	18. St. Pierre, Joseph M.  - Weapon Maintenance and Repair

Joseph Michel St. Pierre. Born in 1970. Weapon Maintenance and Repair. Black hair he wears long and in a ponytail or two braids, blue eyes, bronze skin. Graduated top of his class at Sault Ste. Marie Area High School. Went into the Navy, and then joined as Coast Guard reserve. He actually learned most of his gunsmithing at his uncle’s shop, between that and the technical education he received in the Navy, he has little problem working on SHIELD’s high tech and low tech weapons. Member of the Odawa tribe.

He’d seen the Navy as a way out of the Soo, but came back when his mom got sick, to take care of his younger siblings. He joined the Coast Guard reserve, and worked in his uncle’s gun store to keep the lights on and everyone fed. Once his mom got better, he called the SHIELD recruiter who’d contacted him when he was still in the Navy to ask if they still wanted him. 

He likes working for SHIELD. He didn’t think he’d like Captain America, but he finds Steve ridiculously easy to get along with. 

Joe is, in part, how they managed to reverse engineer the Hydra weapons from WWII. They’d been stuck for several decades, when Joe walked in, tore one apart, put it back together, and told them where they’d fucked up. 

Joe doesn’t drink, he’s been the butt of enough ‘drunk Indian’ jokes in his life. He does on very rare occasions smoke a little pot when he’s on leave. He alternates leaves between going back to the Soo to see his family, and traveling. He sends a large chunk of his pay to his family to keep them afloat and he’s paid for all of his younger siblings’ college and trade schools.

Joe is a lapsed catholic, with no use for the old guys in Italy, as he calls them. Nor is he all that wild about exploring his people’s spiritual roots. He’s largely agnostic.

Joe survived the Fall of the Helicarriers by hanging on to something and then scrambling out as quickly as he could while fighting to stay conscious. He woke up sprawled on the riverbank with Ethel smoking a cigarette next to him, both of them soaked. He asked if she’d drug him out, and she said he’d made it under his own power and collapsed next to her. She kept an eye on him to make sure he was breathing. 

When she went to Stark Industries, Joe was one of her first hires. He’s attached to both R&D and Security, as well as periodically consulting with Tony. After the Accords it took a healthy pay raise and a bonus to keep him from leaving. He doesn’t consult with Tony anymore. 

In his free time he plays classical guitar, and he’s contemplating picking up the banjo to keep his fingers nimble.


	19. Hawthorne, Melissa Diana. Hand to Hand Combat, Wilderness Survival.

Melissa Diana Hawthorne. Born in 1990. Hand to Hand and Wilderness Survival Instructor. Melissa has brown hair, blue eyes and pale skin. Homeschooled until high school, her parents were part of a Survivalist group. From an early age all of the children were schooled and drilled in hand to hand combat, weapon use, and wilderness survival skills. 

When she was old enough to attend high school, her mother convinced her father to let her go to the county consolidated high school. In high school she found out about the larger world, and after graduation ran away to join the Army. She’d had to fight her way through her father to leave, knocking him out with a chunk of wood, shouldering a backpack and taking one of the compound trucks to Beulah to catch a Greyhound to Bismarck. 

In the Army, her unconventional hand to hand training made her a formidable opponent, and she learned the more standard forms of martial arts quickly. She is an average shot, but deadly when it comes to knife fighting or hand to hand. SHIELD recruited her after her second enlistment, as a Hand to Hand instructor. After the interview process, they also had her teach recruits advanced wilderness survival. 

When the Helicarriers fell, she had a small squad out on a wilderness survival training in the wilds of Canada. Incommunicado for two weeks, they came back to the pick up site, and no one came for them. Melissa told them this was a further test of their abilities and they hiked three days to the nearest town to call in. It took another two days to get someone out to retrieve them.   
When the Quinjet arrived, two of her recruits were immediately taken into custody as Hydra. Melissa was routed to Stark Industries where Ethel explained the situation, and asked her to take a position on the Stark Industries Security Team. 

Melissa is Pepper’s bodyguard. She dresses in navy or charcoal pantsuits, low heels and cream or pale blue blouses, with simple jewelry. She likes Pepper, and Michael. She sometimes relieves Pepper’s receptionist for quick breaks if no one else is available and has a pleasant phone voice. She’s not fond of New York, and wishes she could go back to the wide open spaces of the West. But she also feels like there’s something she needs to finish with SHIELD, whatever form that may take. She did not pick sides in the fight over the Accords. Having grown up in relative isolation she does not have that strong a loyalty to Cap, although she does like him personally. And Ethel reassures her things will work out. 

Melissa reads a lot, and watches a lot of movies. That IS the one thing she likes about the city, being able to go out any night of the week to a theater and catch some sort of film. Stupid comedies, dramas, mysteries, horror, science fiction, animated, she isn’t discriminating. She really enjoys cinema. Pepper is planning on sending her on a trip to Universal Studios, for an actual behind the scenes tour. 

Melissa also listens to a lot of different kinds of music, though she favors classical and country. She is part of Ethel’s weekly poker game, and has no poker face to speak of. She doesn’t care, she enjoys the company.


	20. Holman, Cassidy L.  - Potential Recruit/Barista Stark Tower

Cassidy Lynn Holman. Born in 1990. Coffee Roaster, Stark Tower Employee Coffee Shop Manager. Graduated Inglemoor High School. AAS from Bellevue College, Business Accounting. Trained as a Coffee Roaster at Espresso Vivace in Seattle. Cassidy has also studied martial arts since she was very young, many different forms. She enjoys Escrima the most, and Muay Thai. She has also studied Judo, Karate, Kendo and Boxing. She has shoulder length hair she keeps dyed in various pastels, brown eyes and light brown skin.

Cassidy’s older brother, Scotty, worked as a scientist for SHIELD, and shortly before the helicarriers fell, discovered that many of his cohort were HYDRA. In response, a new neighbor, Barbara, introduced herself to Cassidy and Scott’s dad. They started dating, and she moved in shortly thereafter. She was, in fact, a HYDRA agent. Scotty did manage to visit one more time, and warn Cassidy while taking her out for ice cream. If anything happened, Barbara would kill them, Cassidy, their father and their younger sister Erin. 

The day the Helicarriers fell, Cassidy had a martial arts tournament. None of her family had shown up and when she heard the news, turning on the radio in her truck, she knew. She drove home, and broke in through a bathroom window she and her brother had always used to sneak out. She could hear Erin crying. Barbara was waiting with one of Cassidy’s father’s guns. Her father and Erin lay bloodied on the floor. Erin still whimpered. Cassidy jumped Barbara, got the gun away and beat her to death with it, then called 911. 

She was arrested, then exonerated as people poured through the HYDRA files. Erin lives with their grandparents in Kenmore, WA. She has recovered some use of her legs. 

When Stark offered her a job at Stark Tower as part of an outreach plan to help those victimized by HYDRA Cassidy leapt at the chance. The pay far beat anything she could get in Seattle, and it got her away from some bad memories. She misses Erin and sends money to help her grandparents. Stark has talked about having Erin come out for an experimental nerve treatment. Cassidy is both excited and terrified of this.

Stark bought her a roaster and set her up in the Tower, letting Trey work on it to shoot for low emissions. This led to many arguments about needing to smell the beans to make sure the roast was going well, and temperature requirements. You can faintly smell the coffee while she’s roasting. 

She works out with the current and former SHIELD agents for the challenge. She likes Melissa a lot, but isn’t sure Melissa swings that way and is afraid to ask. Once a month they have a melee meet where everyone brings their different weapon’s proficiencies and they draw from a hat to see who fights whom. 

It is merely a matter of time before someone tries to recruit her to security, or to SHIELD, whatever. She knows it. But she isn’t sure how she feels about that. She doesn’t care for guns at all. 

Cassidy suffers from PTSD, and it is part of the reason she agreed to move so far from Erin, because she feels like she needs to get her shit together before she can effectively be there for her sister. 

When she took over the coffee counter, she immediately did away with uniforms, and started playing music. Stark moved her into a mid-size office/storefront type space with seating for about 20 and an excellent sound system in it. He turned hiring and firing over to her, as long as they could pass the background checks. She kept all the previous employees, and hired more to help with the expansion. She’s training another roaster. Because the coffee shop is open 24 hours to be available to Stark’s R&D people, Cassidy takes a lot of night shifts. She doesn’t sleep much. So she is well acquainted with Jesus, Rebecca and the other night-time wanderers. She sings along with the music in the coffee shop and does maintenance on the machines at night. Jesus swears he can tell what kind of mood she’s in by what she’s playing. She typically wears heavy metal band t-shirts with the necks ripped out and jeans with Converse IIs. 

She’s met Cap once. He apologized for her brother’s death, and she hugged him tight, feeling more like she was comforting him than the other way around. 

She’s been caught on more than one occasion dancing with Gigi in the middle of the night. Jesus lets her feed Pepe a teeny corner of a scone when they visit. And she and Sierras have spent a few nights just shooting the shit. SL has similar taste in music. And she and SJ compare hair care.

There was a rumor tucked away in the HYDRA files that her brother had found a way to smuggle out some of the super soldier serum he’d been working on, and inject his sister. The notes did not say which sister, and Cassidy won’t talk about it. 

Cassidy speaks English, Spanish, Tagalog.


	21. Davidson, Charlotte R. - R&D Electronic Surveillance

Charlotte (Charlie) Regina Davidson. Born in 1970. R&D, Electronic Surveillance. Born in Beverly Hills, California. Tall, slender but strong, tan, blue-eyed, leggy blonde with orthodontically straight teeth and a perfect nose. Her father was a successful mid-level television producer who had steady work, a propensity for producing shows with longevity if not award winners, steady midweek network fare. She grew up privileged and she knows it. She has one older brother and two younger brothers. Her parents sent her to a private school where she excelled academically, even if she was one of the “bad kids.” She graduated with a 3.9 and took a year off to bum around. One day on her way back from the mall she stopped into an Air Force recruiting office, and signed up. Not even for ROTC or officers’ school, but as a regular recruit. 

What the Air Force found was that a childhood spent ratting around television studios and her dad’s AV stuff made her an excellent recruit for electronics training. And teenaged years filled with Tennis, Jazzercise and aerobics made her fairly able physically. 

In her third month of eletronics school, someone kept swiping her underwear. Pissed, she built a video surveillance system, and attached bugs to several pairs of underwear, resulting in the court martial of her Sergeant and job offers from the FBI and CIA. Quote, “Those panties were La Perla!”

She stuck with the Air Force through the completion of school and her first enlistment period. She was just before telling the CIA to go fuck themselves when SHIELD approached her. 

Charlie was one of Peggy Carter’s last personal recruits. Given SHIELD’s resources and the access to the minds inside, she dove into formulating spy gear and a few accidental weapons, like one of the versions of what would later become Natasha’s Widow’s Bites. While she enjoys fiddling with computers she was always carefully shunted away from working with SHIELD’s networks, and now she knows why.

Charlie has never married. She has a few aliases under which she belongs to several sex clubs in different cities. 

It took almost three days to dig her out of her lab in the Triskelion after the Helicarrier crashed into it. The failsafe systems she’d helped design worked as planned, and when rescue crews cracked the seal on her lab, they found Charlie and her assistant, Tanika, sitting at a workbench eating cup o'noodles, while a pile of HYDRA plants lay unconscious in a corner, having fallen prey to one of Charlie’s many boobytraps, and a containment system that rezapped them every time they started to come around.

Tony leapt at the chance to hire Charlie, and a sizeable wardrobe allowance was part of the hiring package. 

Charlie’s nickname is Malibu Barbie, although mysteriously the electronics of people who call her that seem to quit working shortly thereafter. She does still look like she should be shopping on Rodeo Drive instead of heading up an R&D Division. She plays squash, tennis, golfs and plays volleyball, as well as working out in the gym. 

Sierras refer to Charlie as Tesla. They collaborate on several projects. 

Charlie speaks English, Spanish, German, Hebrew and Russian.


	22. St. John, Tanika M.  - Communications Specialist

Tanika Marie St. John. Born in 1989. Communications Specialist. Born in Atlanta, GA, Tanika spent most of her childhood in or near Denver, CO. Tanika has reddish brown hair she wears naturally, grey eyes, and heavily freckled light brown skin. Tanika’s mother met her father while he was in Germany on leave from the Marines. She had Tanika in Atlanta, staying with her husband’s family while he was stationed on the USS Durham. Tanika is the oldest of three children. She has two younger brothers. 

After retiring from the Marines, her father settled the family in Boulder, CO where Tanika and her brothers were frequently the only black or mixed race children in their classes. They spent several weeks a summer with their grand-parents in Atlanta. They have never met their German grandparents.

Tanika participated in many extra-curricular activities including Chess club and AV club. She enlisted in the Marines, like her father, after high school. A childhood spent playing with her father’s HAM radio equipment led to Tanika enrolling in the Communications school in Twenty-Nine Palms, CA. She took as many courses as she could, and was deployed with a unit to Iraq. 

Tanika’s record is marred only by disciplinary actions following fights she got into while ‘rebuffing’ advances. Several times she pulled wounded squad mates under cover after they were wounded. 

Tanika did her tour and left as soon as she was able, to go back to Colorado and start working in her father’s repair business. Shortly after she got back to Colorado, she was approached by SHIELD, and signed on with the intent of sending money back to her folks. She dove into learning the new technologies as fast as she could, and caught Charlie’s eye. Charlie tapped Tanika as her protege. The roster said “Assistant,” Charlie says protege. 

When the Helicarriers fell, Tanika was in the lab with Charlie, who insisted on setting up her own “security system,” while they worked. Interruptions would be rebuffed, persistence would result in shocks. Intrusion, unconsciousness. "I had brothers, I know how men can be when they think it’s ok to interrupt women,“ was Charlie’s reasoning. Hearing that rationale, Tanika made a few additions of her own, with Charlie’s approval.

After they were extracted from the lab, Charlie took Tanika with her to Stark Industries, where Tanika’s title as Associate Engineer is more in keeping with her protege status, as is the accompanying raise. 

She still sends money home to her folks and the boys, who are in college now. 

In the lab the two of them trade off days when they each get to pick the music, and they keep up on the older technologies just in case. They have a HAM radio set up of their own and go by the handles Malibu Barbie and Rapunzel. 

Tanika favors pencil skirts and blouses or sweaters, hose and low heels. She wears her hair natural, favoring braids or twists to keep it contained in the lab. She thinks Cap is hot, and has never spoken to him. Thinks Tony’s a blowhard, but no worse than any other boss she’s had, including her own father. She and Jesus get along great. He calls her an "Air-wasting Space-taker,” and she insults his heritage in fluent Spanish. Then they laugh, and go have a beer. She’s very fond of Pepe. She and Charlie have dinner and drinks often, as well as working together in the lab all day and frequently into the night. 

Tanika speaks English, Spanish, German, Arabic and Kurdish.


	23. Nazari, Dylan - Cook/Interpreter

Dylan (Diya al Din) Nazari. Born in 1977. Cook and Interpreter. Born in Aleppo, Syria. Orphaned at the age of two during the Islamist Uprisings of the late 70s/early 80s. Diya was brought to the US by his grandmother, later joined by his grandfather. They moved in with a distant cousin who ran a cafe in Brooklyn, and had been widowed not long before. His grandmother changed his name to Dylan because it sounded more American. Naturalized through military service in the Army. 

Dylan grew up in his “Aunt” Deena’s diner in Brooklyn, and after she passed his grandparents took it on. They are getting up there, and Dylan was contemplating retiring from SHIELD to take over the diner, when the Helicarriers fell. After being pulled out of the wreckage of the kitchen of one of the Helicarriers a day and a half after the crash, he checked himself out of the hospital and hopped on a bus back up to New York and the diner. He lives in one of the apartments over the diner. With his return his grand-parents have retired, and he runs the diner with a squad of younger cousins hired on as waiters, waitresses, short order cooks and hostesses with the odd rescued street kid thrown into the mix. 

After his grandparents had bought a house out in the suburbs shortly after he graduated high school and joined the military, they’d let the four apartments over the diner grow cluttered and fall into disrepair. On his leaves from the Army and later SHIELD, Dylan came back to clean out the old apartments and refurbish them, refinishing floors, replacing plumbing. Another cousin worked on the electrical systems, since he didn’t trust his ability to teach himself electrical wiring from library books and youtube videos. 

In the Army he had worked as both a cook and as an interpreter, depending on what was needed more where they were. He is an average shot, and a tough and dirty fighter, having grown up gay and Syrian in a rougher part of NY. After his second tour, SHIELD brought him on as a cook in the Triskelion and then for one of the Helicarriers.

Dylan is out to his family, and most of his friends. His grandmother still hopes that he will meet a nice girl and “change his mind.” His grandfather shakes his head, and tells Dylan to be happy how Allah made him. 

Currently, the diner is staffed by Dylan as manager/head cook/baker, his cousin Samira is 18 and his assistant manager. The diner is open 24 hours, and a horde of other cousins work there, some intermittently, some on a more or less permanent basis, depending on need (theirs and his). He also has a soft spot for street kids, and usually has one or two on staff who he feeds and gives a place to stay, as well as teaching them how to short order cook and/or bake.

Currently one of his charity cases was brought to him by Clint Barton right after the Helicarriers fell. Isabella is 17 years old and Barton handed him an identification for her that he assures Dylan will “pass,” not that it is actually hers. Belle sleeps in one of the other apartments that is still mid-renovation. She takes online classes, and is as accurate a shot as Barton is. She enjoys working in the cafe, and shortly after arriving, cut her long sandy blonde hair and dyed it a deep burgundy. He left her with Dylan, and a couple thousand dollars to cover expenses. Every so often Natasha Romanoff swings buy to see if they need more money. 

Dylan speaks English, Arabic, and French. 


	24. Mirza, Zerya G. - Psychologist/Counselor

Zerya Gulsin Mirza. Born in 1984. Psychologist/Counselor. Served in the Peshmerga in the Kurdish Liberation Movement. Born in Kirkuk, Kurdistan. She has black hair in loose curls. light brown eyes and light skin that tans easily. Zerya did well in school and was considering going to medical school when the death of an older brother at the hands of the Iraqi military motivated her to join the Peshmerga. Injured in a skirmish, she walks with a notable limp, having lost most of her right leg. She has also lost her right eye. After she was injured, a cousin in London brought her to England to recuperate and receive medical care. 

Zerya spent the first three weeks in hospital, and very angry with her cousin for taking her from Kurdistan while she was unconscious and could not consent. 

After her recuperation, she was fitted with a glass eye and a prosthesis and started classes for her Psychology degree at Cambridge with a boost from another relative who worked there in Economics. She focused her studies on combat-related PTSD in adults, but soon her focus drifted a bit and she included children and other non-combatants. Once she finished her degree and started her graduate work, SHIELD recruited her. When she said she was done fighting, and what use could they have for a maimed soldier, Natasha explained the need for therapists and counselors they could trust. SHIELD would talk to her graduate advisors to see if she could get credit for working for them towards her advanced degree. Once her advisors okayed it, she said yes, packed up her things and joined SHIELD. 

Zerya worked with many of her patients on the Helicarrier in a small office off the infirmary. She was offered Stark Industry prosthetics and refused for her leg, but said she would be glad of the eye, as long as she could swap out the iris for different designs and colors. The comment was a joke, but Tony took it to heart. Zerya now has a prosthetic eye with several “vision settings” like zoom, thermal and ultraviolet, and can change the pattern and color of the iris with an app on her phone. 

Zerya had been off the Helicarrier getting a new prosthetic leg fitted. She’d ordered a pale blue ceramic leg with darker blue roses and Red Kites (the bird of prey) and was getting it fitted at a local prosthetic company when the Helicarriers fell. Once the leg was fitted comfortably, she took a cab back to the area, and started hunting for survivors up and down the river banks, even wading out into the water to pull several folks up on the bank. After helping all the survivors she could find, she spent time sitting with those who were triaged at a lower urgency, and trying to help them process what had happened. She saw the Winter Soldier pull Captain America from the river, and wait until he was sure Steve was breathing before leaving. 

That night Ethel made her go to a hotel room and get some sleep. When Zerya woke up there was a change of clothes and a quick breakfast waiting for her, and a car to take her back to the hospital, where she did the rounds of the injured who were awake, talking with them, letting them know she would be there, talking to the kids of some of them. She spent the better part of the week at the hospital visiting with the wounded. 

Once Ethel signed on with Stark Industries she brought Zerya with her to continue to counsel the many SHIELD agents and staff who were also signing on with Stark. She still has the ceramic prosthetic. Tony covered it with a clear, tough protective coating for her, and services it regularly. It has a hidden compartment where she keeps a knife and a small gun. She has to remember to take these out if she has to go to a civilian airport. 

Zerya has discovered a deep love for everything from LUSH, and the employees at the store closest to Stark Tower know her by name. She favors A-line skirts that reach just below the knee and boatneck tops in jersey material in various jeweltones. She carries a battered leather satchel that she’s had since she was a child, it had been her father’s. 

She has offered to counsel Tony, but he just waves a hand and grumbles under his breath. She knows that you can’t force someone to actually go into therapy, they have to come to it on their own. If he’s ever ready, he’ll talk to her. She did serve as Cap’s sounding board, more than counselor, before he left. She tries to remain neutral on the subject of the Accords, at least in how she reacts to Tony, but it is difficult. Being raised as a member of a minority that the majority was determined to wipe out is not something you “get over” regardless of how much therapy you get or give.

Zerya speaks English, Kurdish, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian.


	25. Manigat, Stefan J. - Doctor

Stefan Jude Manigat, MD. Born in 1980. Doctor - Infirmary Helicarriers. Born Miami, FL US to parents who had emigrated as refugees to the US from Haiti and Cuba. He is dark skinned with brown eyes and close cropped hair. Stefan attended public school and excelled. His extended family all chipped in to help pay an exclusive college prep school with a scholarship he won. He hated it, but he kept his head down and bulled through. He graduated a year early, doing his homework at the public library until the priest from his parish raised the money to buy him a laptop. Got his Medical Degree from University of South Florida, did his initial Residency at Johns Hopkins, and did his Emergency Medicine Residency in Detroit, MI at the Detroit Receiving Hospital. 

SHIELD recruited Stefan as he weighed his options for employment. Staying in bitter cold Detroit or looking for something more southward. Between hunting accidents in the surrounding communities and gun violence in Detroit itself, Stefan is well trained to handle most types of gunshot and other trauma.

He works well with Zerya, and respects her a great deal, as well as having a crush on her. He spends a great deal of time wondering how to talk to her outside of work or about non-work related things. All terrible stereotypes about “Latin” men aside, he’d spent his teenaged years and 20s working his ass off to get through school as quickly as possible, and had never dated, in spite of several crushes on classmates. 

He had been the one to suggest the ceramic prosthetic to Zerya in the first place. He’d seen an article, and thought she might like it, leaving it on her desk with a post-it on it that said, “Interesting.” 

Stefan does have some hobbies. Since being recruited by SHIELD working out and learning how to fight has topped the list. He’d had a few dicey moments patching up enemy combatants so they could be interrogated. He’s still not sure how he feels about that. 

He’d been out in Switzerland attending a medical conference when the Helicarriers went down. As soon as they news reached him, he dove for his phone, trying to reach Zerya, Ethel, anyone in DC. The cel towers were jammed and nothing functioned at the Triskelion. He retreated to his hotel room so he could plug his phone in and keep trying, in between reassuring his own family that he was fine and far from the site of the incident. It took him 8 hours to reach Ethel. She reassured him Zerya was fine, and then told him he needed to shit or get off the pot. 

The next night when Zerya returned to her hotel room there was an enormous flower arrangement of lavender roses waiting for her. The note said, “These were the closest to blue I could find on short notice. I will be back soon. Stefan.” He and Zerya have been seen having very cozy lunches since then, both of them smiling more often.

Shortly after the Fall, Ethel hired him to work in the Stark Industries infirmary. When he pointed out he was a trauma/ER doctor, she pointed out this was Tony Stark they were talking about, and Sierra. He accepted immediately.

Natasha terrifies him. He likes Ethel, she reminds him of his grandmothers. Melissa also terrifies him. Gigi is far too forward for his tastes, as are Charlie and SJ. He feels very big brotherly toward Tanika. Gloria is a very competent nurse and he enjoys working with her. He likes Cap. He pities Tony. 

Stefan speaks English, French, Spanish, and is learning Kurdish to surprise Zerya.


	26. Reynolds, Rosalee (Lee) J. Public Relations

Rosalee (Lee) Jayne Reynolds. Born in 1988. Public Relations. Born in Davenport, IA. Got a BA in Communications from University of Iowa, Masters of Communications with a focus on Public Relations from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Moved to San Francisco to become a PR person for the Sex Workers Outreach Project. She has also done some work for local Roller Derby Leagues and Coyote. Lee currently has long straight black hair with blue and purple highlights and Bettie Page bangs. She is heavily tattooed with pagan and fairy tale imagery, with half sleeves on both arms, her torso and much of her legs, many of the images are feminist subversions of classic tales. 

Lee’s parents raised her in Iowa with her other siblings, seven in all, as part of a conservative evangelical christian sect. Lee got out the first chance she got, applying for emancipation and participating in Running Start to get some college credits out of the way while she finished high school. She lived with a cousin who had never been a member of the church and his partner, later husband. 

Her cousin, Craig, and his husband Sam, put her through school for her BA, and helped out with her Masters. She still talks to them frequently, and visits when she can. 

Ethel hired Lee after the fall of the Helicarriers, figuring someone who had experience being the mouthpiece of sex workers’ rights organizations would know a thing or two about coming back from behind the 8 ball. She hadn’t believed the job offer, but accepted the flight back to New York. Once there, she met Steve and her jaw dropped. 

Lee adores Ethel and treats her like an honorary grandmother. Ethel is quite fond of Lee as well, and finds her bluntness refreshing. Lee is not a fan of ‘spin.’ Lee is a fan of stating what happened plainly, explaining how that is never going to happen again, and what you will do to make amends. Since Stark Industries is big on amends making, this makes her job easier. 

Pepper likes Lee as well. She’s never been a fan of mealymouthed half apologies either, and when Lee’s first proposed statement after the Helicarriers was an explanation of where the government had fucked up and let Captain America down, and he did not intend to let that shit happen again on his watch, Pepper clapped. She and Steve have collaborated on many of his post-Fall speeches. 

After Tony told her what happened with the Accords, and that he wanted her to write a statement disavowing Cap, she punched him, knocking him on his ass, and stalked off tossing “I quit,” over her shoulder at him. 

Pepper sent Michael to run after her and beg her not to quit. That SI wasn’t Tony anymore and that Pepper really needed and wanted her to stay. 

Lee stayed on at SI, but moved to an apartment out of the Tower after the nonsense with the Accords. Pepper gave her a pay raise and a bonus for staying and has forbidden Tony to talk to her until he finds a way to make up for this. 

Lee has passed word along through Ethel that she will do whatever she can to help Steve and the others, consequences be damned. And has been open about her opposition to the Accords, offering her services to Anti-Accords and other Civil Rights groups pro bono.

In her free time she works out in a crossfit gym, and skates roller derby, although she doesn’t compete. 

Lee speaks English and Spanish.


	27. Cobb, Jackson R. - Search and Rescue

Jackson Rebel Cobb. Born in 1991. Search and Rescue. Born in Chapel Hill, NC. Grew up outside of Chapel Hill, and spent his youth hunting and fishing in the Blue Ridge Mtns. In high school he began training in Search and Rescue after a younger cousin was lost for two days in the wilderness. He has an AS in Criminal Justice and a BS in Environmental Studies. He volunteered as Search and Rescue all the way through college. Jack, as he prefers to be called, is tall with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Jack worked as a Forest Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, leading up many of their Search and Rescue Operations. He’d been in DC for a conference when the Helicarriers fell, and immediately ran to the Potomac to start pulling people out of the river, making sure others were nearby to start CPR or do basic first aid and then diving in again to pull more survivors out. He worked at it until nightfall, then rested while manning a coffee station for divers looking for any survivors trapped in air pockets in the wreckage. 

He caught Ethel’s eye, and she got his name and contact info, ostensibly to thank him. After the dust had settled, she called him up to offer him a job with SI/SHIELD as it was shaking out. Jack thanked her, and told her he really wasn’t much for a lot of people. Then she explained the job.

The job she offered him involves traveling to various of SHIELD’s safe houses and making sure they’re stocked, functional and uncompromised, as well as acting as Search and Rescue, and checking up on one or another of Tony’s properties. Ethel has authorized Jack to train in all varieties of S&R, including snow, coastal, high seas and mountain terrain. He was one of the crew sent to retrieve Tony from Siberia. 

Jack is anti-Accords, but believes in doing his job. To the best of his knowledge, his job is making sure that SHIELD safe houses in the wildernesses of the world are not compromised or being used by anyone inappropriate. Ethel has told him that he has wide latitude in his definition of inappropriate and compromised. He has, in fact, come across Cap and the others hiding out in “forgotten” SHIELD properties, and has left piles of supplies in front of the door, vanishing into the wilderness before they could spot him, thanks to his knowledge of codes and camera placement. 

He found during Mountain and Winter SAR training that he rather likes cross-country skiing and snow-shoe-ing. He is an excellent shot, and has on one occasion. stopped to help Hawkeye dress a deer Hawkeye had killed. He declined Hawkeye’s invitation to go back to the safe house with him, stating plausible deniability. "I can’t tell them who I saw if I didn’t see anyone.“   
He has a huge crush on Cap, and would prefer not to actually have to talk to him, if he can avoid it. He’s pretty sure he’d just be scarlet and stammering the entire time. 

Jack speaks English, but is learning enough Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Laplander to get by, as well as a little Spanish and French. He travels with a large Caucasian Shepherd/Ovcharka he’s trained as a SAR dog named Scout.


	28. Stephenson, Jared Michael - Electrician

Jared Michael Stephenson. Born in 1990. Electrician. Born in Oakland, CA. Raised by very liberal parents, both college professors at UC-Berkeley. Jared is of average height with black hair and blue eyes. Jared did very well in school, graduated top of his class, and then decided to go to trade school to become an electrician, much to his parents’ disappointment. Quickly Jared became the go-to guy for difficult jobs, especially those involving updating antique electrical systems. He has a knack for it. 

To appease his parents, Jared has also taken several electrical engineering classes, getting an Associates in it and taking a few higher level classes while considering getting a four year degree in it. He feels the engineering classes give him a little bit of an edge working with the actual wiring. 

Jared worked on the wiring for Tony’s Bel-Air mansion. When Tony came upon some wiring issues someone who knew someone, who knew someone suggested Jared. Jared came down, listened to what Tony wanted, looked at the wreckage of what Tony had tried to do, the schematics, then nodded and went to work. After several hours of muttered curses, and some cajoling, the new grid worked exactly as Tony had envisioned. 

On Tony’s word, SHIELD recruited Jared to work on the new Helicarriers. Jared worried about the massive power outlays to the weapon systems, but after what had happened in New York, he figured it was justified. 

Jared was working deep in one of the circuit bays, when he felt the Helicarriers start to lift. He started to make his way out when he heard two of the Agents who’d been assigned to help him, talking about having to kill him as an undesireable, one of whom used his deadname. Jared slipped deeper into the workings of the helicarrier, and slipped out into an unfinished portion of the craft, looking for anything he could use as a weapon. 

The Helicarrier he was on started to fall, and he scrambled madly upwards, looking for a place to cocoon himself. He found a mound of packing material near some recently unwrapped equipment, and dove in, anchoring himself to some struts. 

He was pulled out several hours later, unconscious with broken ribs, one arm broken in one place, the other dislocated, and a massive concussion. After emergency surgery to mitigate swelling in his brain, he woke up in the hospital with Tony standing and watching him. 

Tony put Jared on the SI payroll starting immediately, and covered the hospital bills. As soon as he was mobile, Jared packed everything into his van, and let someone drive him to New York. 

He lives in an apartment in Stark Tower, and has regained the use of his arms, his ribs have healed, and his hair has grown over the scar from the surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain. He still gets sudden and intense headaches, but medical scans have not revealed anything obvious. The longer it goes, the more infrequent they are. Jared is shy around Gigi and Sierras. Natasha both terrifies and is very attractive to him. He really enjoys working with Tanika and Charlie, and has contemplated asking Tanika out. He’s still trying to work up the nerve. 

He told Tony signing the Accords was a terrible idea, and they had a shouting match over it. After a couple of weeks they grudgingly made up, but Jared still needles him about it.

Jared still owns a house in the Bay Area that he is letting an organization for LGBTQIA youth use as a halfway house. 

Jared speaks English, Spanish, Mandarin and Tagalog.


	29. Weaver, Luna C. - Demolitions and Explosives

Luna Camelia Weaver. Born in 1968. Demolitions and Explosives. Raised by parents active in the Weather Underground, and later the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front and other radical environmental and animal rights activist groups. Luna spent her childhood moving around a lot from remote cabins to communes, to squats. She has a younger sister, Violet Starshine who ran away at 16, changed her name and disowned the rest of the family. Luna’s hair is long, dirty blonde with dyed chunks of seemingly random colors through it, and she has hazel eyes. She keeps it braided back when she’s working. She had little by way of formal education, and came to the notice of Nick Fury when her parents were arrested in the early 1990s for their part in several ELF bombings. 

By the time her parents were arrested, Luna worked as a stripper up and down the west coast, traveling to stay close to her parents about whose health she worried. A federal prosecutor briefly considered attempting to charge her with aiding and abetting, and Fury talked him out of it, instead offering Luna the choice of signing on with SHIELD as a demolitions expert and an explosives forensic expert. 

Luna’s parents had taught her how to make bombs, make timers, how to adapt new technology, and how to stay one step ahead of the law. Luna is reasonably sure her parents took the fall for other members of the group because of her father’s failing health. 

Luna had several sets of ID in various names on her when Fury took her into SHIELD. He let her keep them all updated through her sources, and does not pry. Luna knows of safe houses all over the US that SHIELD is not privy to. Fury encouraged her to take formal classes in demolitions and explosives, as well as forensic methods on SHIELD’s dime. Luna did not make many friends among the SHIELD agents and staff. Melissa, Gloria, Jack and Jesus are about the extent of her friendships in SHIELD.

Luna visited her parents in prison when she could. She doesn’t talk about what she does for a living, and they don’t ask. When they were paroled, she bought them a relatively remote cabin with some land for them to farm and have chickens and goats. She built a pottery for her mother adjacent to the cabin. It is close enough to a touristy destination that her mother can take soap, candles, and pottery in to town to sell when she wants extra money. Luna had several of her mother’s pottery pieces that she kept in her quarters. 

With the fall of SHIELD and the Helicarriers she has retreated to her parents’ cabin. She doesn’t talk about how she got out, whether she was in the Triskelion or on one of the Helicarriers or whther or not she was attacked by any HYDRA plants. She was in DC, that much is known. She has nightmares about falling, fire and water. She’s spent her time with her parents making repairs on the cabin, pottery and outbuildings, and helping her mother with the animals. Her father’s mobility is somewhat limited. He spends most of his time sitting on the front porch of the cabin in a porch swing Luna made for him. Recently, she and her mother made a loom for the wool from the sheep she’s started keeping in the last few years. 

Ethel keeps tabs on Luna. She plans on pulling her back in when the time is right. They spoke on the banks of the Potomac very quickly. Neither will say what they discussed, but Ethel knows that when she calls, Luna will come. 

Luna speaks English, Spanish, and Basque.


	30. Guzman, Ximena M. - Computer Hardware Technician.

Ximena Marcella Guzman. Born in 1992. Computer Hardware Technician. Born in the Dominican Republic. Short, curvy, dark hair and eyes, dark brown skin. Came to the US as a child with her mother, her father had been killed in a hit and run accident. At best an indifferent student, she dropped out, got her GED and started her own computer repair business. Tony heard about the whiz at computer repair and recruited her. She had initially refused, then her grandmother pointed out how much money they could send back to the family, and bring more of them to the States. So she called Tony back and accepted.

Her grandmother brought Ximena and her mother to the US with help from a church group when she was three. Shortly thereafter she started playing with abandoned pieces of technology. As she got older she made money fixing other people’s computers, DVD players, what have you. Soon she was cobbling together her own tech out of abandoned, broken and outdated technology.

After Tony recruited her, he paid for her to learn several programming languages in addition to her physical skills. Then he loaned her to SHIELD for some of the more intricate work on the helicarriers. She had already finished her work there and was back at Stark Industries when the Helicarriers fell. When one of the other computer techs at SI drew a gun on her, she tazed him and locked herself in a server closet. It took Anton several minutes of talking in rapid fire French to convince her to come out, and that it was safe. 

Ximena remains nervous around people she doesn’t know well, and startles easily. She’d worked with the tech who’d drawn the gun on her, Pete, for years and had no idea the grandfatherly older man had been HYDRA. That shook her. She’s been working with several neurologists and psychologists to improve lie detector technology for her own peace of mind. 

After the fall she convinced her mother and grandmother to move into the Tower with her. They share a four bedroom suite. Ximena’s mother works in Jesus’s restaurant as a cook and he keeps asking her to marry him, perhaps only half joking. Her grandmother spends a lot of her time knitting blankets for charity. Ximena sends a large chunk of her earnings back to family still in the Dominican Republic. She has also started stashing cash in a go-bag, just in case.

She doesn’t sleep much since the exposure of HYDRA, but is not part of the Midnight Wanderers. Instead she stays awake poring over HYDRA technology files, and SHIELD technology files, looking for weaknesses, exploits and ways to improve them. Never one to trust easily, she’s gotten more isolated and anti-social since the Fall. She sees Zerya on a weekly basis, and it helps, but she is still very fragile. She has nightmares about Pete shooting her. 

She has also started creating her own security robots and drones that are stationed inside her suite and hiding in the ductwork near her apartment. Several are hidden around her office. They are semi-autonomous and have settings from ‘disable’ to 'kill.’ 

They are shielded from Friday, and even Tony does not know they exist. 

Ximena speaks English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.


	31. Virtanen, Taina H. - Translator/Negotiator

Taina Hilkka Virtanen, PhD. Born in 1984. Translator/Negotiator. Born in Helsinki, Finland. Dark brown skin, grey eyes, keeps her hair in short twists, tall and slender. Favors slim fitting skirt suits with soft ruffled blouses in pastels. First in her class, graduated with Masters in Psychology from the University of Tampere in Finland, a Masters in Linguistics and a PhD in Political Science from Oxford in England. 

The only child of a Finnish Ambassador, Taina has lived all over the world. She does not know her father. Her mother told her he was a fling while she was stationed in Jamaica, and she had never spoken to him again. Uncharacteristically, Taina took her at her word and quit asking. 

In crowds, Taina remains quiet until her skills are needed, officially or unofficially. But she watches and listens, taking in everything going on around her. Long before she actually speaks to you, she already has your number. There are a few exceptions to this: Ethel is the main one. Taina cannot get a read on Ethel no matter how hard she tries. For this reason Ethel fascinates her. 

Taina had decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps with a career in ambassadorial service, when she happened to be at the scene of a bank robbery in New York during a vacation. Not only did she negotiate the release of the hostages, including herself, but she convinced the theives to turn themselves in. This pinged hard on SHIELD’s radar and Ethel recruited her. 

Taina frequently flies to hot spots around the world to negotiate the release of prisoners or prisoner exchanges, for information, or other goods. She has disguised herself as a man to work in more hostile areas, and laid the helpless female schtick on in others. She is a social chameleon and would appear as at home in a biker bar as she does in a fancy lounge on Fifth Avenue or in Paris. 

Taina was in the middle of complex negotiations for the release of several SHIELD agents from China when the news came of the Helicarriers fall. The second they heard, one of the agents acting as her bodyguards drew a weapon on her and her other bodyguard. Taina managed to talk him down long enough to grab the gun and knock him unconscious with it, before strangling him with a handy curtain cord in her hotel room. 

Then she and her remaining body guard packed minimal clothing into a briefcase and large purse, and walked out of the hotel room as if going sightseeing, saying her other guard was taken ill and not to disturb him. The two of them made it to an extraction point and her pilot, who was nearby and thankfully not HYDRA picked them up and they flew back to DC citing an emergency call. Taina feels bad about leaving those SHIELD agents in the hands of the Chinese, but with just three of them, she didn’t feel they could get them out, or that there would be a guarantee that any of them weren’t HYDRA. 

She did return several months later on a Stark Industries jet, apologizing for leaving in such a rush, and if the Chinese know she killed her bodyguard, they still haven’t mentioned it. After interviewing the SHIELD Agents China held, she allowed them to execute the four HYDRA plants they had, and took the others home.

Taina listens to Scandinavian Death Metal through noise-cancelling earbuds to relax. She works out in the gym, and since joining SHIELD has taken several hours of hand to hand combat, knife and gun training. She also enjoys ballroom dancing, and periodically borrows Anton from Gigi as an escort. Taina would rather go with Gigi, but she’s not sure if she wants to sleep with someone in the company. 

The HYDRA Agent in China was not the first person Taina has had to kill in the line of duty. She is not thrilled about that facet of the job and tries not to, but some people cannot be reasoned with, and Nazis are all of them. 

Currently, she works for Pepper, negotiating business deals and translating. She admires Pepper greatly, not only for her business sense, but for her ability to still flind Tony lovable after everything he’s put her through. She and Pepper tend to cut a swathe through international meetings like Bilderberg. 

Taina speaks English, Finnish, French, Russian, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Arabic and Hindi. She reads ancient Greek, Latin and Sumerian.


	32. Flynn, Jean-Pierre. Security/Hand to Hand Combat Instructor

Jean-Pierre Flynn. Born in 1992. Security/Hand to Hand combat. Of average height, stocky, tawny brown skin, dark eyes, shaved head. Dual Irish/Algerian citizenship. Average student, fought in underground bare knuckles fights for spare cash with an excellent record. Ethel recruited him after he was picked up in a raid on an underground fight ring. She offered him a job with Stark Industries/SHIELD as security and a Hand to Hand instructor. 

Jean is the son of an Algerian mother and Irish mercenary father. His father shipped he and his mother to live with his parents in Ireland when he was a toddler. His mother hated it and they moved to London to be closer to other Algerian immigrants, and the West Indian community. Although not West Indian, his mother got along far better with them than she had in Ireland. Jean-Pierre has only seen his father a handful of times in his life, although he did send them a fair amount of money on a regular basis. 

Ethel brought him in post-fall of the Helicarriers, and she and several of the others have filled him in on what happened. In particular, he has spent a fair amount of time drinking with Anton and Joseph (Joseph drinking soda or coffee), talking about what it was like to find out people you’d worked with for years were secretly HYDRA. Jean understands that, he had a good friend of his turn Nazi skinhead on him when they were in college, and he never quite got over the betrayal of it. 

He works out in the gym with Melissa a lot, and enjoys sparring with her and Anton a great deal. Jean has his own demons and is part of the midnight wanderers, as Cassidy calls them. He has been known to have Cassidy load up some ska or swing and dance with her and Gigi in the coffee shop in the middle of the night. He sometimes accompanies Melissa to the movies, ribbing her about her lack of discrimination. 

Jean lives in the Tower and spends a lot of his free time reading. He thinks the unlimited access to all the books on his tablet is the best perk of this job. He does like physical books, though, and haunts second hand bookstores for out of print editions of classic pulp adventure tales. He also has a secret cache of regency romances.

When he is not on duty, he dresses like a SHARP (SkinHead Against Racial Prejudice) in tight jeans, tucked and rolled, Doc Marten’s or Grinders, a Fred Perry or button up shirt with thin suspenders to match his boot laces, usually blue or purple for no other reason than he likes those colors. If he leaves the tower, he wears a black flight jacket with anti-nazi patches on it. 

Sierra L is very taken with Jean, and too shy to say much to him. 

Jean speaks English, French, Arabic, Tamazight, and Gaelge.


	33. Asmara, Kidisti. Intelligence/Research

Kidisti Asmara. Born in 1987. Intelligence/Research. Born in Safed, Israel. Kidisti is tall, muscular, with dark red-brown skin, and dark hair braided tightly over the top of her head, then falling in large curls over her shoulders (a combination of albaso and gilbrich). She favors slacks and sturdy blouses, with very serviceable oxfords. Her nails are nearly always flawlessly manicured. Kidisti’s parents are shepherds near Safed, and spared no expense in their daughter’s education. Kidisti excelled in school, graduated with honors and after volunteering for the IDF, she applied to become Mossad.

Beta Isreal women are typically exempt from military service because they follow a religious lifestyle. Kidisti wanted none of that. She enlisted at 18 and applied fo the Havatzalot Program for Intelligence. After spending her 9 years in training and the military, she applied to become Mossad. 

SHIELD approached Kidisti after word of her performance in Mossad reached them through a contact in Israel. Disappointed by the treatment of her people in Israel, Kidisti took SHIELD up on its offer, and went to work for them in their Intelligence Division. Kidisti reported discrepancies, concerning discrepancies she had discovered to her boss, and he gave her the HYDRA pitch. 

Unsure just how far entrenched HYDRA was, she played along, and as she dug further, she realized she’d be killed once her utility was done. 

The day the Helicarriers fell, Kidisti killed her supervisors in the Intelligence sector and most of her co-workers. Very few of the Intelligence sector were not HYDRA. As the Helicarriers fell, she tried to shepherd out as many of the non-HYDRA intelligence officers as she could. When questioned about how they could trust her, she said simply, “I’m an Ethiopian Jew. I was higher on that list than any of you.”

Kidisti would go first, take out the HYDRA plants who thought she was one of them, and then lead the others. She got them to the motor pool, and piled into an SUV. When the Helicarrier that hit the Triskelion started to fall, she stopped the SUV, and had them all dive into the Potomac, following last. She got all of her surviving Intelligence people up on the bank, including the man who couldn’t swim, and the woman who got knocked out by a chunk of falling debris. She got a few cuts and bruises herself.   
Ethel hired her on at Stark Industries, and put her to work in the thinly veiled “Research” Division she and Tony had put together. She works out in the gym, and reads trashy pulp novels about spies and mercenaries. She can frequently be heard laughing as she reads them in the coffeeshop, particularly if they feature the Mossad. For several months her favorite phrase when something went wrong was, “Oh, John Ringo, No.”

She has PTSD, and is one of the Midnight Wanderers. She frequently sits in the coffeeshop and watches the others dance and laugh. She periodically has dinner and drinks with Charlie and Tanika. Kidisti’s parents are still alive. She doesn’t see them or speak to them often, but she gets regular emails from them and her siblings regarding the herds, the grandchildren, and on occasion, eligible bachelors her age back home in Safed. 

Kidisti speaks English, Hebrew, Tigrinya, Amharic, Arabic, French, and Urdu.


	34. Nguyen, Mireille J.T. - Administrative Assistant, Accounting

Mireille Jeannette Therese Nguyen. Born in 1988. Administrative Assistant to the Head of Accounting. She is short and slender, with bobbed black hair and dark eyes. She dresses very “French,” in fashionable clothing with good shoes. Mireille was born in Lille, France to parents who had fled the fall of the French Colonial puppet state in Vietnam. She is the youngest of five, and the only one without an advanced degree among her siblings. Instead she joined the French military, where she acquitted herself adequately with a gun and in close combat. She spent several years working in the family accounting firm. 

A friend of her commanding officer, who had been in France to recruit him to SHIELD, upon meeting Mireille decided she’d be an excellent addition to the Accounting office. She has an excellent grasp of accounting, and forecasting budgets, as well as speaking several languages fluently. She came to SHIELD shortly before the Helicarriers fell, and was still going through orientation at the Triskelion when it happened. She and another orientee took out their instructor when he declared himself HYDRA, wrestling his gun away and beating him unconscious with it before leading the others out of the Triskelion before the Helicarrier hit it. 

Ethel brought her to Stark Industries almost immediately. She is doing administrative support for the accounting department, and reports to Michael who reports to Pepper. 

When it comes to fight training, she has a tendency to feint clumsily at her opponents so they underestimate her before really going after them. She has met Natalia Romanoff, the Black Widow has cautioned her against relying on convincing her opponents to underestimate her. Then utterly destroyed her in sparring practice. Mireille has stepped up her training and is looking forward to a rematch. 

Mireille rather likes New York. She’d always hoped to move to Paris, Lille being quite provincial. But New York is more than adequate. She frequently shops with Ada and goes dancing with Gigi and her escorts.

She has a small studio apartment in a secure building (vetted by security) not far from the Tower, because she values her privacy. As the youngest, she rarely had her own space, especially as close as her extended family was. She cherishes her solitude. Her apartment is simply furnished and her closet filled with good quality pieces she combines in a variety of ways. She chides Ada for her addiction to fast fashion and Ada gives her a hard time for dressing like somebody’s mother, somebody’s rather well-dressed mother, but all the same. 

The one exception to her rather staid dress, is her quirky shoes. She is constantly on the lookout for unusual, high quality shoes. She won a pair of the Alexander McQueen monster heels in an eBay auction, and even though she can’t walk in them, she periodically tries them on in her apartment. At work she tends to wear Fluevogs, Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik. She frequently wears shoes with a higher heel to compensate for her height, or lack thereof. 

Mireille speaks French, English, Vietnamese, Thai, Urdu, German, Russian, Dutch, Flemish, and Japanese.


	35. Seymor, William R. Consultant

William Richard “Billie Dick” Seymour. Born in 1946. Consultant. Born on a farm outside of Carthage, Missouri to Sharecropper parents who could not legally marry until he’d been in Vietnam for two years and in SHIELD for one and a half. Very light-skinned black man. He worked the farm with his parents and hunted wild dog packs for the bounty until he volunteered for the Army at 16 with his father’s permission, to escape accusations of rape after he pulled a white boy off of the daughter of the man his parents farmed for. He left town one step ahead of an arrest warrant and lynch mob. 

Older black men helped him through basic, not that he needed much help. He was already an excellent shot, and had a working knowledge of explosives from helping clear farmland. In Vietnam he found himself stationed at an ammo dump with a group of other “weirdos,” including a Kennedy Husband from Washington state, a hippy kid from New York who had flunked out of school, assorted other weirdos, and a large number of black soldiers. 

Because it was an ammo dump, and he had a working knowledge of explosives, he got put in charge of inventory. After realizing how often the damned dump got blown up and it was near impossible to track munitions, he started experimenting with them, largely to kill time as the rule in the Army seemed to be “If you look busy, people leave you alone.”

One of his COs noticed his tinkering, and forwarded a few of his designs up the ladder, taking credit for them. Shortly thereafter, Peggy Carter showed up to recruit him personally. She sent his CO off to chat with some general, and walked into the shed where Billie Dick worked on his designs. He told her he was still technically underage, and she said SHIELD would fix all of that, and if he wanted the recognition his skills deserved he could come with her, or he could stay. Billie Dick jumped at the chance. 

It took some getting used to the fact that Ms. Carter did not allow anyone to treat him as less than because of his race or his education level. He nearly balked when she gave him a white lab assistant with an MS in chemistry. She explained that while Wayne Randolph Traynor was good with chemicals he did not have Billie Dick’s flair for design, the intuitive leaps that made his designs special. Wayne nodded, not at all put out by the explanation. 

They became fast friends. Billie Dick expanded Wayne’s spice palate, taught him how to dance and talk to women, and how to fight after an enemy attack on the lab nearly killed him. Wayne helped Billie Dick with his coursework to finish first his high school diploma and then his bachelors degree, tutoring him in advanced mathematics and chemistry. Thirty years later Billie Dick was one of the primary mourners at Wayne’s funeral after he died from pancreatic cancer, and godfather to all three of Wayne’s children, including William Wayne Traynor. 

Billie Dick retired in his 60s, but after the fall of the Helicarriers came out of retirement at Ethel’s insistence. He lives in Stark Tower, having been living in a Senior Housing Complex in Denver, Colorado. His parents died in a car crash not long after the Loving decision allowed them to marry after more than 20 years together, and they had left him nothing and no reason to return to Missouri. Billie has his doubts as to how accidental that crash was, but felt that digging into it could only lead to heartbreak. He had to go to court to be allowed to bury them next to one another, backed up by Peggy, Dum Dum Dugan and other members of SHIELD. 

Billie Dick married once, a very pretty Italian woman he’d met at a conference, but it didn’t last. He has no children of his own, but Wayne’s kids and grandkids still call him Uncle Billie Dick, and keep in touch. He’s helped put a couple of them through school, helped the youngest, a girl, escape a bad marriage. Showed up with a bunch of his old SHIELD buddies and put the fear of god into her husband while she packed. 

Currently he’s corresponding with Luna. She’s quiet, a little distant, but Billie Dick respects her privacy, and speaks to her only when necessary. He gives her space otherwise. He is part of Ethel’s poker game. He likes Michael. He’s gone dancing with Gigi. And treats Tanika, Kidisti and Taina like they’re his grand-daughters. 

Billie Dick speaks English, Italian, a little Vietnamese, and a little Spanish.


	36. Rabinovich, Kennedy X. Lab Assistant R&D/Body Armor and PPE

Kennedy Xaviera Rabinovich. Born in 1994. Lab Assistant R&D/Body Armor and PPE. Born in Brighton Beach, NY. Father is a rabbi, her mother converted to Judaism to marry him. She has medium brown skin, hazel eyes, and hair she wears in locs and dyes burgundy. She favors blue jeans, t-shirts with nerdy slogans, in jokes and catch phrases under bright cardigans, and sturdy, men’s work shoes. She is medium height and chubby, but strong.   
Kennedy is on loan from MIT to Stark Labs to work with Sierras on a sort of internship to complete her Master’s thesis. She is named after President Kennedy and her paternal Grandfather. She was raised in Reform Judaism, and still practices, if she’s a little careless about kosher. Jesus does go out of his way to make sure he accommodates her when she eats in his restaurant or orders up to the lab.

She graduated early from high school, and went to MIT on scholarship at 16. She has finished her Masters and is working on her PhD. Sierras have informed her that she has a job with them whenever she wants one. 

Kennedy is the lab assistant who helped the Sierras out when Q arrived by running to a nearby pet store with a fistful of twenties and picking up everything they would need for the cat, including toys, catnip, litter, food, litterbox and treats. She may be Q’s favorite person. 

The job at Stark Industries did come with the offer of an apartment, but Kennedy opted to live with one of her great aunts in one of the few “affordable” units still left in Manhattan. Kennedy’s aunt has lived there long enough to be one of the few rent-controlled apartments left in the building. 

Before Kennedy moved in her aunt’s landlord was more or less a slumlord. All it took was a couple of visits with Jesus and Anton in tow for him to straighten up. Pepper has had Michael aquire the building on the sly, and has vastly improved living conditions. She intends to keep it a low-income building for all incoming tenants, and is working that out with the city. Kennedy lives with her aunt and her aunt’s several rescued cats. A long haired black tom cat named Pulitzer has decided that Kennedy is the love of his life, and sleeps in her room. 

Kennedy does not date. It isn’t that she’s not interested, but appropriate boys are few and far between, not that that stops her father from matchmaking. And she’s busy. Very busy. 

She spends a lot of nights on Sierras’ couch when work in the lab runs long, and they have watched all of Misfits, the original British Skins, and are steadily working their way through all of Dr. Who on a dare from Tim. Up next is Being Human. 

Kennedy may be the most well-adjusted human being in the entire Tower. She had a great childhood, great parents who love her and supported her no matter what. She has an extensive local family network, and loves what she does. Apart from minor bullying, and the natural deaths of her father’s parents, she has had no major trauma in her life. She does suffer from insomnia, but it isn’t PTSD related, rather she sometimes cannot stop thinking about new polymers and designs. So she is also a regular at the Midnight Wanderers club in the coffee shop. 

She really hopes the Winter Soldier gets better and can come to NY, because she really wants to see what that arm is made of. 

She blew most of her first paycheck at ThinkGeek and rigged her replica sonic screwdriver to work as a laser cutter. It still has to be plugged into a powersource, but still, impressive. Tony has his eye on her. 

Kennedy speaks English, Hebrew and Spanish.


	37. Kyenge, Archange E. Sous Chef

Archange Emmanuel Kyenge. Born in 1990. Sous Chef. Born in Kalemie, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). At the age of 8 he was taken to be a child soldier in the army of Laurent Kabila, President of the DRC at the time. He was rescued and “re-integrated” with society at 11 years of age. He does not talk about those years. He has many old scars criss-crossing umber colored skin, dark eyes and close-cropped dark, natural hair. He wears chef’s whites, and knows he looks striking in them.

After his stint in the “army” as a child, Archange returned to Kalemie and worked as first a bus boy, then as a kitchen helper in one of the fancier hotels. The chef took a liking to him and taught him to cook, explaining the use of various ingredients, and how to integrate them. Pierre had planned to sponsor the boy to a cooking school in France when he was older, but died from a heart attack. 

Archange continued to work in the kitchens, and learned all he could. Pierre, who had no children had left him a small sum. He tried to set the money aside for school, but he used most of it to support his younger siblings. 

One day as he was walking home, he came across a skirmish where several men attacked a lone red-haired white woman in an alley. Archange dove in, dispatching two of them easily, while she took care of the other five. They stopped and looked at each other for a long moment, and then Black Widow offered him a job. 

He told her he did not wish to fight anymore, that he wanted to cook. She told him that they needed cooks too, and said she’d be back for him, but she had to take care of something first. She made sure he got clean away from the bodies before leaving.   
Two weeks later, Natasha and Steve Rogers walked into the hotel where Archange worked, and asked him how he felt about going to cooking school.

Archange had finished cooking school, and had been stationed on the Helicarrier with Jesus about three months before they fell. He enjoys cooking with Jesus, if he doesn’t entirely understand his sense of humor. 

When the attack by Hydra forces came, Archange froze after being shot in the arm. Jesus fought off their attackers and half carried Archange, in the middle of a PTSD flashback, out of the Helicarrier after it landed. Jesus held him until he came back to himself and could quit crying. Jesus may be the only one who has ever heard the story of Archange as a child soldier from Archange himself. 

Archange is very fond of both Natasha and Steve, and was torn during the fight over the Accords, but once he heard she had let them go to take care of things, even though it involved shocking the King of Wakanda, he forgave her. 

He enjoys learning new cuisines as much as Jesus, and the two of them are constantly trying out new ideas. He enjoys working with Ximena’s mother a great deal. 

After several PTSD panic attacks following the Fall, Jesus signed Archange up for a service dog. Archange was dubious at first, then he met the rescued Afghan Hound the service found for him. She came with the name “Pearl.” He calls her Mpenzi. They go for a run every day, and he brushes her immediately afterward, putting a barette in her bangs so they stay out of her eyes. When he is working, Mpenzi sleeps on the couch, waking up to greet him at the door, or occasionally yawning from the couch, her tail thumping on the cushions. 

Archange is a huge heavy metal fan. Monday nights at Jesus’s restaurant have opened him up to many different kinds of music though. As has his crush on Isis. After listening to her extol Nikki Minaj’s virtues while giving Mpenzi a quick once over, he started listening to hip hop. He has decided he likes Missy Elliott much better. 

Archange remains very quiet, and Mpenzi attends his hand to hand training sessions with him. She also accompanies him to the gun range, and has her own set of ear protectors in princess pink. As time goes on he has fewer panic attacks during training sessions, though things in real life still spook him periodically. 

Archange speaks French, English, Kingwana, Swahili and some Spanish.


	38. Hitchcock, Wiley M. Handler

Wiley “Will” Martin Hitchcock (not his actual name). Born in 1965. Handler. Black hair and eyes. Son of second generation Japanese Americans, whose parents had been interred during WWII. Went into the Army directly out of high school. Will is exceptionally good at logistics and strategy. After several years in the military, he went into the CIA, and became a handler for certain covert assets, of the sort of covert where “we can neither confirm nor deny…” While Ethel may know he and Rebecca’s real names, she will not divulge them to anyone. 

At the time the helicarriers fell, he was still Rebecca’s handler, even though she was recuperating and it had not yet been determined if she would be allowed to return to the field. When Cap approached her, she went to Will and asked him to jump ship with her. He did. 

Over the several years of their partnership, he’s come to think of her as the daughter he never had. When he discovered the officer responsible for her extraction from Afghanistan had panicked and left her there, he beat the young man unconscious, and then got busy. He stayed by her side in the hospital until she regained consciousness after surgery.

His work has been his life. He finds the amount of downtime they have between missions now to be disturbing, and spends a lot of time at the range with Rebecca. She’s trying to convince him to join her in event planning, and he admits, it does sort of appeal to him, the logistics of the large scale events. Instead, he spends a lot of time going over intel, and picking out fresh targets. 

When Rebecca was first assigned to him, she found his utter and complete lack of hobbies and interests outside of work disturbing. She started buying him netsuke boxes. Annoyed at first, Will has come to treasure those boxes. It has become a game between them. She tries to sneak new ones onto the mantle in his quarters without him noticing. HIs apartment is right next to hers in the Tower.

Will also feels betrayed by the infiltration of HYDRA. He had really believed in America, in spite of what his parents had gone through with the interrment. And he is taking it as personally as Rebecca does. 

Will suffers from insomnia, but spends his nights up reading all the books he otherwise doesn’t have time to read. He prefers classic literature. Rebecca’s tried to get him to read Ludlum “for the LULZ,” but he’d rather re-read Ivanhoe, or War and Peace. He listens to a lot of late 70s arena rock and early 80s heavy metal, and occasionally stares at the ceiling wondering if he was wrong to go into the military, and wondering how deep HYDRA’s meddling went. 

Will speaks English, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Thai, Russian and Spanish.


	39. Zoccarato, Eleanora V. - Scientific Translator

Eleanora Violetta Zoccarato. Born in 1966. Scientific Translator. Born in Vicenza, Italy. Eleanora has light brown skin, brown hair just going grey that falls in natural spiral curls past her shoulders, and light brown eyes. She is tall and slender, and always impeccably dressed. She has the equivalent of a Bachelors in Chemistry, and several advanced degrees in Linguistics from SSML in Vicenza (Scuola Superiore Mediatori Linguistici). She had a very loving middle class childhood, peppered with tales of resistance fighters during the war. One of her grandfathers was a black American GI who stayed after WWII to marry the woman who would be her grandmother. 

Eleanora has worked for years as a translator for SHIELD. She met Billie Dick when he needed a translator for a conference in Italy, and they fell in love. Sadly, the marriage did not last, between work assignments keeping them apart and neither of them willing to budge on the career paths and trajectories they had each chosen. But it was a fairly amicable split and they are still friends. They may both still harbor hope that after they get to retire they may rekindle their romance. 

Eleanora was at the SHIELD office in Milan, Italy when the Helicarriers fell. The very few HYDRA agents who had worked their way into the organziation there were immediately dispatched by multiple agents. They were the first location to call in completely clean and offered themselves as a safe haven to any agents on the run. 

With the splintering of SHIELD Eleanora is not sure what to do just yet. Ethel has offered her a position with Stark Industries, but it would mean moving to New York, London, Paris or Rome. She has been stationed in Milan for years and is very fond of it. If she moved to New York she could be near Billie Dick, who emailed her to let her know he was back at work. Interpol has also offered her a job, as have several universities.

She lives in a small flat very near the SHIELD office, which is disguised as an import broker’s office. She knits, and is delighted with the new carbon steel knitting needles, as this means she always has a weapon to hand. She makes beautiful lace, it keeps her busy, and she has maintained the tradition of knitting coded messages into the lace, mostly just to amuse herself. She swims and plays tennis avidly. Her rare vacations are typically to locations with sunny beaches and big drinks.

Eleanora speaks Italian, English, French, German, and Romanian.


	40. Washington, Leroy D.  - Vending Machine Service and Repair

Leroy Dwayne Washington. Born in 1948. Vending Machine Service and Repair. Dwayne has short cropped grey hair, red-brown skin, and brown eyes. Born in Detroit, MI, Dwayne remembers the race riots of the 60s. As soon as he graduated high school, he joined the military and found himself shipped off to Vietnam. He volunteered for the Rangers, and somehow managed to survive the war. He remained in the service, and rose to the rank of Master Sergeant. He spent much of his career training Army Ranger Battalions, but saw further combat in places like Nicaragua and other locations in South America. He favors khakis with button up short sleeved shirts, and combat boots.

SHIELD attempted to recruit him several times throughout his career, but only the last was successful, when he was near retirement, they asked again and he responded that he would sign on if they gave him the job he asked for. The recruiter nodded, and he told them about his summer job as a kid, servicing vending machines for his uncle’s company after school and during summer breaks. "That was the happiest time of my life. Can you let me work on vending machines? Do you even have vending machines?“ 

The response was, yes, they did have vending machines. When Fury heard he said, "Why the hell not? Someone’s got to service the damn things. They keep breaking, and its gotta be cheaper than buying new ones all the damn time.” 

So Leroy resigned his commission, arranged for his pension to go into an account that would be turned over to his nieces and nephews should anything happen to him, and joined SHIELD.

It took him a bit to get up to speed with the new vending machines, but he viewed it as a challenge, and had himself up to speed in no time. The controls may all be computer chips, but the mechanisms hadn’t changed much at all. The bonus of having Leroy on board was that they could restock and/repair whenever, as he often flew out on missions with them. He also worked on the machines at the Triskelion. 

Leroy was in Detroit the day the Helicarriers fell, attending his grand-niece’s 16th birthday, having bought her a brand new laptop and annoying his niece and her husband. "It was that or a car, choose.“ All of his nieces and nephews went to school where they chose thanks to Uncle Leroy, and he continued the tradition with their kids.

When he saw the footage on the TV, he went ashen, and called the switchboard. After two days of trying to get through, Ethel called him. She told him he was out a job and what did he want to do? "I want to come back.” 

Ethel sent him a plane ticket to New York, and told him someone would pack up his apartment in DC. When he got there Tony scoffed at having a human vending machine service man, but Pepper immediately reminded him how often the machine near his lab didn’t work because he couldn’t be bothered to dispatch a robot to take care of it. 

After the Accords fiasco, that particular vending machine works perfectly, it is however, stocked only with things Tony hates. Pepper will not let him say anything to Leroy. 

Leroy, like a lot of combat veterans, has PTSD, which has at least once nearly killed Tim. Leroy apologized and gave him a free candy bar from the machine, before going back to work as if he hadn’t just had a gun to the younger man’s stomach. Tim thanked him, and backed away slowly. Working for SHIELD is not doing Tim’s mental state any favors.

Leroy outrageously compliments all the young women, but he treats Kidisti like a Queen. And has often said, “Why couldn’t I have found you when I was young enough to do something about it?” He’s even made Charlie giggle. 

Leroy never married, although he did have a series of short flings over the years. He suspects he may have a child or two out there, but no one ever came after him for child support. He plays poker with Ethel and the others on a weekly basis. 

Leroy speaks English, French, Vietnamese, Laotian and some Spanish.


	41. Santos, Sofia V. - Waitress

Sofia Valentina “Tina” Santos. Born in 1994. Waitress. Sofia was born in Brooklyn, NY. Her mother came from the Dominican Republic, and her father who was also Dominican, died when she was small. Tina did not graduate from high school, she has her GED and is taking classes in a local community college. She’s still not sure what she wants to be when she grows up. She has very light brown skin and wavy, dark brown waist length hair, and brown eyes. She has several tattoos related to the gang DDP (Dominicans Don’t Play). Tina tends to wear jeans and t-shirts when not waitressing. When she’s working, she wears the “uniform” of “Nice shirt, nice pants or skirt, just don’t fucking embarrass me, ok?” Jesus hired her to keep her out of the gangs after he heard her fighting with her boyfriend. on the street. 

Jesus stepped up to intervene, the guy swung on Jesus, and before he could retaliate, Tina punched him out, then looked at Jesus and said, “All right, good looking’, let’s go.” He asked if she was serious about getting out of the gangs. She said, yes. He hired her on the spot. He got her moved into Stark Tower, as she’d been sharing a shitty apartment with a few other girls from the gangs. She still hasn’t quite wrapped her head around the fact that he didn’t do it to sleep with her, and is waiting for that shoe to drop. In the meantime, she enjoys living in the Tower. She likes going to school again, even if it is just basic and breadth stuff right now. 

Ximena’s mother, Juliette, has taken Tina under her wing to attempt to further civilize her. Tina hasn’t seen her own mother in several years, after a falling out over her new husband. She adores Juliette and she and Ximena get along just fine. She is one of the very few people that Ximena has told about her bots, or the go-bag. Tina just hugged her and told her she was on her side, no matter what. 

Zerya has noted Tina’s empathy for others, and has suggested that she go into counseling. Pepper has noted Tina’s people skills and her ability to slip effortlessly from one role into another when dealing with people, and has suggested law school, hinting strongly that SI would fund it. Tina’s not sure how she feels about either suggestion. 

Tina is another member of the Midnight Wanderers, with PTSD from things she did and saw in the gang, as well as some things from her childhood. She has tentatively reached out to her mother, and received no response yet. Every so often she would hang out with Sierras to play with Q. Sierras have suggested a cat of her own, not that they don’t like having her around. But Tim gets all stuttery when she’s there. 

One night, walking home from meeting an old friend (not gang-affiliated) at a bar nearby, she found a tiny grey kitten. She scooped it up and banged on Isis’s door at 2 in the morning. Isis set her up with some formula, an eyedropper, explained that with a kitten that tiny she’d have to rub it’s butt to get it to poop, and went back to bed, leaving Tina standing in the hallway, a grey kitten squalling in her hoodie pocket and her hands full of stuff. 

She managed to raise the kitten on her own, enlisting Isis and Ximena as occasional kitten sitters while she worked. She named him Namorado, but winds up calling him Urso Minisculo most of the time. He is not so tiny any more, and weighs in at 18 pounds. He sleeps on her pillow and wakes her up five minutes before her alarm by patting her lips. 

This gives Jesus more ammunition in the, “I am not now and I am never going to sleep with you, because…” argument. "Because that monster of yours would eat Pepe.“ 

Tina has seen the clubs that Charlie comes out of, and says nothing. She has met Natasha once or twice. The spy gives her the nod, like she knows something Tina doesn’t know she knows. It makes Tina a little uneasy.

After the Accords and after Captain America left, Tina went off at Tony in a high volume tirade of Portuguese, Spanish and English that made several former Marines in the immediate area blush. She wound down with, "And you do what you have to to make it up to him. You hear me?” before stalking off, muttering under her breath.

Tina speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and some French.


	42. Baptiste, Isis N. - Pet Nutrionist

Isis Neriah Baptiste. Born in 1991. Pet Nutritionist. Because he brought her in to take care of Jesus’s dog and Sierras’ cat, Tony considers her adjutant to SHIELD. Born in North Amityville, NY to parents who emigrated to America in the 80s, her father was a college professor. Isis has dark brown skin and brown eyes, with long straightened hair (a la Nicki Minaj, who is a goddess, she will fight you). She is tall and curvy and wears jeans, and henley style shirts, and keeps her hair braided when she’s working with the animals. 

Isis took a summer job at a local vet clinic and decided to become a veterinary assistant prior to going to Veterinary School. She never made it to vet school, but has taken a 500 hour certificate course to be a Clinical Pet Nutritionist. Part of the perks of being on-call for all the various animals in the Tower, is an apartment in the Tower. Tony is also talking about putting her through Vet school if she still wants. 

Once she passed the security checks, part of her hiring was self-defense and hand to hand classes. She has no problem hitting or being hit. She played rugby in high school and community college. She hits like a freight train. She spars with Melissa and Anton fairly frequently. 

As more SHIELD refugees and new recruits arrive at the Tower and the training base up north, often with pets, she is finding herself busier and busier providing basic first aid, dietary and exercise advice, and training tips. She flies to the training base at least twice a week. 

Isis and Pepe get along famously, and she enjoys Jesus’s cooking, and Ximena’s mother’s cooking as well. She likes the Sierras all right, but finds the answering in unison when they dress so differently a little weird. Sierra L has pointed her to an excellent tattoo shop, and introduced her to some cute punk rock boys. She’s even met Jack and his dog Scout, and after getting slobbered all over, recommended more red meat for his diet. 

Isis likes music, most music. She is not a big fan of new country. She does listen to a lot of Hip Hop, and had a bit part as a booty girl in a video shot in a club she and a girlfriend were regulars at. She is also very fond of punk rock, but until recently felt a little alienated by how white the scene was. 

Shortly after she’d been hired, she came in from running errands cradling a dog that had been hit by a car, her shirt covered in blood. Cap grabbed a car and driver, and went with her to the nearest emergency vet. He stayed with her and offered her his shirt to replace hers. When she tried to return it, he told her to keep it, “Tony keeps buying me new ones.” The dog is fine, but needed to have a leg amputated. Isis kept her and named her Sherry.

Isis may or may not sleep in that shirt.

Sherry is obviously a mutt with a very storied lineage, a new party game in the tower is trying to guess what that might be. Sherry has short legs like a Basset Hound, but her torso is about the size and shape of a German Shepherd, with ears and lips like a sharpei. She’s a light fawn in color, and very sweet tempered. The missing leg doesn’t slow her down at all. 

Isis still hasn’t spoken to Tony after the mess with the Accords. 

Isis speaks English, French, Spanish, and Trinidadian/Tobagoan Creole.


	43. Nimitwanitch, Vivienne M.  Salon Manager, Stark Tower.

Vivienne Michele Nimitwanitch. Salon Manager, Stark Tower. Born 1983 in Bellevue, WA. She graduated from high school an average student and went to work in her mother’s nail salon. Vivienne favors tailored skirt suits, and pumps. She has long, wavy black hair, dark brown eyes, and pale olive skin. Unless she is doing nails herself, then she wears the same uniforms as the other women who work in the salon. Several years ago, she moved to New York to take on a salon run by a distant cousin who had fallen ill. She was appalled by conditions, and immediately asked her mother for a loan to get the place up to snuff.   
To escape the reputation the place had earned as rife with nail infections and sloppy technique, she changed the name to Vivienne’s. Then she closed it for a week for deep cleaning, paying the women who worked there to help her do it herself. And then gave them a paid week, of teaching them how to do nails properly. She had it painted a delicate peach with a smokey, taupey-lavender trim, and retiled in bronze. 

When she paid them full wages for the two weeks the shop was closed, at least two of them burst into tears. When they explained that the most experienced among them did not usually earn minimum wage, Vivienne thanked them for telling her, and reassured the women that they would be getting paid a LEGAL amount of money, PLUS their tips every week. And she would be having a chat with her cousin. 

She bought them each two sets of uniform pants and tops, in either the lavender or the peach, and then bought filter masks, and all the appropriate safety equipment necessary for their jobs. 

At first, the other local salon owners laughed, predicting that she would soon go out of business, especially once she raised her prices. But the brighter more sophisticated decor brought in new customers. The nail technicians, with more and better training, did better work, especially once Vivienne restricted them to 8 hour days, paying them a living wage and letting them keep their tips. Then one day, Pepper Potts broke a nail on the way to a meeting, and pulled up outside. Vivienne herself welcomed Pepper in, and took care of the nail. When they couldn’t match the color she repainted all of Pepper’s nails at no charge. 

Pepper commented on the decor and the uniforms. She spoke with a couple of the women who worked there in Mandarin, which Vivienne does not speak, and looked suitably impressed by their answers. 

A week later, Pepper showed up at the salon with a briefcase. She wondered if Vivienne would like to open a salon in the tower. Stark Industries would pay her a healthy salary, and her employees, to be provide services to the Avengers and to Stark Industry employees, including massage, facials, hair services, and perhaps salt and sugar scrubs. Vivienne protested she’d never performed any of those services, and Pepper smiled. "You don’t have to have done everything to manage the salon. You’re an excellent business woman, I can tell. I looked into the salon’s finances, and called your mother as a reference. She says you’ve already nearly paid off the loan."

Vivienne agreed to manage the salon in Stark Tower, as well as check in with her original nail salon. She took a mix of older/more experienced techs and younger/new techs with her, making sure to leave some veterans behind to train the new crop. She actually rotates employees through the two locations, the Stark Industries’ accountants having worked it out with her.   
She has since hired several massage therapists, hair stylists, waxers, aestheticians, make up artists, and the nail technicians. Anyone in any position can cross train, and the salon will reimburse the cost of their new license. This has resulted in happier employees who stay longer. Pepper has asked Vivienne to help set up similar operations in other Stark office buildings in LA, London, Rome and Paris. 

Vivienne likes Pepper a lot, and looks up to her. She likes Tony, too. He treats her staff well, and tips big. This means her employees fight over who gets to work on Tony, as opposed to who has to. He is always respectful of them, and has not behaved inappropriately. 

Before the Accords, Vivienne came in once to give Captain Rogers a manicure, at Pepper and Natasha’s insistence. He fidgeted through the whole thing, blushing. Vivienne told him he had lovely cuticles and he blushed harder. 

Vivienne takes no shit from anyone. A visiting businessman tried to proposition her in the coffee shop, very rudely, and she had him in a chicken wing, on his knees demanding an apology before anyone knew what had happened. She and all of the Salon employees have times built into their schedules for self defense training, though seeing that, Kassidy said, “Maybe you don’t need it so much.” She has also gone toe to toe with other local nail salon owners over treatment of workers. 

Vivienne speaks English, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish and a little French.


	44. York, Adrian N.  Physical Therapist

Adrian Neville York. Physical Therapist. Born 1981 in Cleveland, OH. Adrian has dark kinky hair he wears in cornrows most of the time, dark umber skin and dark brown eyes. He wears a lot of t-shirts with sports-nerd sayings on them. Born without legs below the knee, later amputated to mid-thigh because of complications, Adrian graduated top of his class in high school, and went to school to become a physical therapist to help others recover from injuries. After listening to a guy talk about how his life was over because he couldn’t use his legs anymore, Adrian just stared at the guy, then decided to get a second degree in Recreational/Rehabilitation therapy to teach others how to live with the limitations that their conditions had given them. He is a huge hockey fan, and worked as a Physical Therapist for the Cleveland Monsters AHL team. 

Adrian grew up in a middle class household. His mother’s pregnancy had apparently progressed normally, to a point. The doctors could not pinpoint when things went wrong, but Adrian’s legs were under developed at birth. He had a happy childhood, although frequently frustrated when well-meaning adults would tell him he could not do the things other children did because he had no legs. 

As he got older he discovered various wheelchair sports leagues, for games like basketball, football, soccer, hockey, rugby and martial arts. He resents the implication that his life is in any way lacking because of his lack of legs, and one time joked to a friend, “What’s so great about shoes anyway?” 

SHIELD recruited him from the Cleveland Monsters team support, and brought him on to work at the Triskelion, as well as several nearby VA centers. He was making his rounds of the VA centers when the Helicarriers fell, and got there as quick as he could. Adrian is a powerful swimmer and dragged several injured people in close enough to the shore of the Potomac for others to help them to shore. 

Adrian has turned down Tony’s well-meaning and repeated offers of prosthetics. He’s not sure how he feels about it. And it wouldn’t fix the one thing that does bug him about his body; how other people react to it. 

Adrian was married, briefly to his childhood sweetheart, just out of college before his second degree. The marriage ended when she asked him if he would mind if they used donor sperm to have kids, because she worried… He left her that night, got rip roaring drunk and into a bar fight. His younger brother bailed him out the next morning. 

Adrian sleeps pretty well, except on the anniversary of his marriage and the anniversary of his divorce. On those nights, and those directly preceding them, he wanders the Tower, frequently winding up at the coffee shop. The second or third time it happened, Gigi coaxed him into dancing with her. He tried to refuse gesturing at the wheelchair, and she said, “I have seen you on the basketball court in that thing. Do NOT tell me you can’t dance.” Thus began Gigi and Adrian having dance dates on the nights he can’t sleep. She asks Friday to keep her apprised of when those dates are coming up. 

Adrian speaks English, Spanish and some French.


	45. Pinto, Sam H. Librarian/Archivist

Sam Hunter Pinto. Librarian/Archivist. Born 1988, in a home birth on the Dineh Reservation in New Mexico. Sam is slender, somewhat on the short side, bronze skin, black hair and eyes, and dresses in close-fitting jeans, button down shirts and sweater vests in a multitude of colors with sturdy and comfortable shoes and the occasional whimsical bowtie. They keep their hair trimmed short, and wear small-lensed, wire-framed glasses. 

Sam’s great grandfather was a Navajo Code-Talker in WWII. Sam grew up listening to their great-grandfather’s exploits, and about the time he met Captain America and Bucky. Sam collected a lot of the old Cap memorabilia, and frequently has a Capt. America t-shirt or tank top beneath their button up. 

Sam studied Library Science at the University of Arizona, getting their Masters of Library Science as quickly as possible, and obtaining a second Masters in Archival Studies. 

Their androgyny led to much bullying in school, but they endured, turning into a quick and dirty fighter, more than capable of defending themselves when pushed. 

After obtaining their degrees, they looked up a couple of their grandfather’s Army buddies in DC and asked to become an Archivist for SHIELD. 

The physical training required of even the administrative staff proved no problem for Sam. They also took on additional hand to hand training, as well as spending time at the firing range to relax. Growing up in the New Mexico mountains, they are an excellent shot. 

Sam had gotten to see Steve in passing at the Triskelion several times, and whenever Steve was in town would be uncharacteristically out and about, instead of holed up in their basement office.

Sam missed a lot of what happened with the Helicarriers’ fall because the second Natasha released the Hydra records into the wild, they were glued to their computer. They were in the habit of spending days on end in their office, which Fury had outfitted with a small bathroom including a shower. When alarms sounded and the firedoors locked, they settled in to wait it out, and obsessively read the HYDRA files on the internet, archiving and backing things up on the army of external hard drives they kept on hand. They occasionally answered concerned emails from Ethel.

When the rescuers arrived, Sam scolded them about dust near the computers, and insisted on putting everything to rights before sealing the room to their corneal scan and leaving with them. 

When they’d heard about the old SHIELD offices that had gotten blown up taking out Zola, they screamed in anguish.

Ethel took Sam with her to Stark Industries. The SHIELD archives are still located under the ruins of the Triskelion in DC, and Sam makes frequent trips back and forth. There are talks of building a new archive. Sam may or may not be in intense negotiations with Stark, Hill and Ethel about its location and the necessary safeguards. 

Sam was the one who gave Ethel the file on Bucky that she handed off to Steve. They had tears in their eyes, but told Ethel they didn’t feel qualified to make that call. When Ethel told Sam she’d given the file to Steve, they went back to their apartment in the tower and ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s in their pajamas, watching The Librarians on DVD, a gift from their older sister, without even making snide comments about the archival practices. 

After the Accords, Sam refuses to speak to Tony, and spends more and more time in the old archives in DC crating things up and getting them ready to move to the new location. 

When Sam is in New York, they are forced by Ethel out of their office periodically. No one says no to Ethel. She makes them get coffee with her, mostly at odd hours. Sam thinks Cassidy is nice, but seems sad. They find Sierras amusing and pity Tim. They are friendly with everyone, but not close. 

The last time someone asked them about their gender, they looked that person (a new recruit who did not make the cut) in the eye and asked, “Why? Do you want to fuck me?” When no answer was forthcoming, they turned and walked away, apparently unfazed. 

Sam speaks English, Dineh, Spanish, German, Russian, and reads and writes Latin and Ancient Greek.


	46. St. John, Carolyn D. Lawyer

Carolyn Darling St. John. Lawyer. Born 1973 in Bath, England. Carolyn is a lawyer who also worked in MI5. She got her law degree From University of Strathclyde, because it covers both schools of law in the UK. She has since taken the bar in New York, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts. Carolyn is tall, slender, pale, blonde with ice chip eyes. She wears elegantly tailored clothing, and keeps her long blonde hair styled up in French Twists most of the time. She grew up with a poster of Peggy Carter on her bedroom wall that she drew for an art competition. She still has it. 

When SHIELD came knocking, she jumped ship eagerly, and moved to DC to become part of their legal team. Nicknamed “The Shark,” she pursued cases with alarming enthusiasm at times, her crisp accent leavening the outrageous things she said with respectability. 

While in DC she became acquainted with a woman in her early 30s, who was a foster parent for hard case kids in the system. She’d had a remarkable amount of success with her kids, but had lost her lawyer minutes before a court date for one of her kids. Carolyn, who had just come off a big case, stepped up and volunteered to take the case, if she could have a 30 minute recess to go over the paperwork. 

After 30 minutes, she went in and represented the kid, badly abused and beaten, against charges of resisting arrest, successfully. Fortunately the cops had been wearing body cameras that day. Charges were dismissed and he was returned to the custody of Luciana Vasquez. When Lucy asked how she could repay Carolyn, she asked her out for a drink. 

Carolyn found Lucy another lawyer (another SHIELD lawyer whose side interest was family law), and they started dating.   
Carolyn was in court the day the Helicarriers fell. One of her fellow lawyers, received a text, stood up and said, “Hail Hydra” before turning on her with a carbon fiber blade. She disarmed him and knocked him cold, grabbing some cuffs from the bailiff and cuffing him. She then pulled the rest of the pins from her hair, letting the disheveled twist fall, turned to the judge and said, “Your Honor, I believe a recess is in order.” 

Freed of court obligations for the rest of the day, she wound her hair back up in a twist, went to her car, and drove back toward the Triskelion, calling Lucy and telling her to lock herself and the kids inside. And not to answer the door under any circumstances.

When it became clear the Helicarriers were falling, she changed into workout clothes she kept in the car, pulled on her sidearm, clipped her SHIELD ID to her waistband, and ran to the Potomac to help retrieve survivors. 

She dragged herself back to Lucy’s place after midnight, and let herself in with her key. Immediately Lucy ran up and hugged her tight, crying. Carolyn hugged her back and said, “Let’s get married, baby.”

When Ethel asked her to come up to New York, there was a fair amount of legal wrangling to get Lucy and the kids up there. Most of the kids had been surrendered by their parents, but not all. They did manage to get everyone okay-ed to move. They have a suite in Stark Tower. Carolyn and Lucy did get married in New York’s city hall the day they moved up. Carolyn wore an ivory skirt suit and Lucy wore a lacy white dress. 

After the Accords, she let Tony have it up one side and down the other, as not only were the Accords a poorly written and ill-thought out document that would be shredded once the lawyers got hold of it, it also sold out Steve, anyone else with powers, including several of Lucy’s kids. She proceeded to lecture him on human rights abuses and how registries like this always wound up with people in camps, dying by design or happenstance, but still dead. Then stormed out before he could say a word.   
Pepper keeps her on the payroll, and she does do work for Pepper but she spends the greater part of her day studying Human Rights law. You cannot render a person illegal, it is a crime against human rights. Carolyn spends much of this time working on the pardons for Captain Rogers, and the others, as well as Bucky Barnes. Ethel has let it slip to her that he is alive and the Winter Soldier. Carolyn has a copy of the Winter Soldier file, and is using it as the basis of a document to sue the US government for gross negligence. 

She does limit herself to 10 hours a day of work, making sure she spends evenings with Lucy and the kids, letting the children know that the government will take them over her dead body, and if they have to they will emigrate to England. 

She does take time out of her schedule to hit the gym, and work on hand to hand training, as well as spending time in the gun range in the sub-basement. She’s got accounts and various identities set up for herself, Lucy, and the kids. She’s pretty sure she can get them out of the country if she has to. 

Carolyn speaks English, French, German, Spanish and can read and write Latin fluently.


	47. Moghadam, Ibrahim. HVAC Tech

Ibrahim al Moghadam. HVAC Technician. Born 1980 in Grand Rapids, MI. Ibrahim was a quiet, studious child, his parents had always assumed that he would be a lawyer or perhaps an Imam. Instead, Ibrahim joined the US military and found his calling in the guts of air conditioners, heaters, and refrigeration units. He also works on air filtration. Ibrahim has light brown skin, and piercing black eyes. He wears workmen’s overalls most of the time he is at work, but beneath them wears jeans and t-shirts with heavy metal band names on them, and converse. He and Cassidy talk about music a lot, he also talks about music with Taina frequently. 

After a sterling high school career, Ibrahim joined the Army to see more of the world than Grand Rapids, a laudable goal. In the Army, he signed up for Utilities Equipment Maintenance and Repair on a whim. Discovering he was good at it was a highlight.   
He signed on for a second tour, and when that was nearly done, SHIELD recruited him. He’d done steady work, and could work quickly if the situation called for it. He’s also genius at making things work, even if they maybe shouldn’t. He manages to get Tony’s harebrained designs to play nice where ever he puts them. Tony’s designs always work, but he doesn’t always have the working knowledge of how things should go together, for them to be strictly practical. This is where Ibrahim comes in, at least with HVAC. 

He has enjoyed working for SHIELD, if not all of the jobs or with all of the people. He’d been wrestling with the air scrubbers near Ethel’s Triskelion office, when Hydra revealed themselves. His fellow HVAC tech, a former Air Force HVAC from Kentucky pulled his gun and said “Hail Hydra.” Ibrahim sprayed him in the face with coolant, then shot him with his own sidearm. Picking up the other man’s gun, he started to make his way out. 

He’d gained the causeway when it became obvious that the Helicarrier was going to crash into the building, and he jumped into the river, swimming as fast as he could for the side, then running hard away from it. Once the explosions had stopped, he turned back to go help look for survivors. 

When a group of them were talking about how floored they were that people they’d lived and worked alongside for years could turn out to be Hydra, Ibrahim just shook his head. "I’d have been surprised if Earl WASN’T Hydra. He was a real sonofabitch.“ 

Ethel brought him up to Stark Industries because he seems to be the only one who can keep the air scrubbers for her office working well. 

He hates that job, but it also gives him access to whatever fun projects Tony has going on, so he went. The filters of the scrubbers for Ethel’s offices, if not changed at least every other day produce a thick, nicotine colored sludge that he refuses to allow to touch his skin. He has special bags to seal the filters in and a special cleaning process for them that involves a chemical bath and freeze drying. 

Politically apathetic, Ibrahim is neither pro-Cap or pro-Tony. He thinks Steve’s an ok guy, but he and Tony get along pretty well. They speak the same language, at least as far as HVAC systems go. He just tries to keep his head down and do his job, in the absence of a concrete enemy to fight.

Ibrahim is very even-keeled. He doesn’t really have trouble sleeping, but does make a habit of staying up at least one night a week to go talk to Cassidy about music, or Taina. He lives in the Tower in one of the smaller apartments, by request. His one extravagance is his stereo system. 

Ibrahim speaks English and Arabic.


	48. Savea, Ioana M. Chief Concierge, Stark Tower

Ioana Malie Savea. Chief Concierge at Stark Tower. Ioana was born in 1989, and raised in New York City. She is tall, stocky, and heavily muscled, with brown skin and curly black hair. She had been pursuing a degree in Coaching and Athletic Administration at Kutztown University in rural Pennsylvania on a Rugby scholarship, when she blew out a knee. Her rugby scholarship gone, she went back to New York to go to community college and get a part-time job. By the time she was back home, she could get around all right, and applied to be a runner at Stark Tower. 

Before long she was making suggestions for changes that made sense to her immediate supervisor, Happy, and he suggested that she be given management of the runners. She took the task on, still only working part-time. 

One notable problem with being a Stark runner was the number of people who were out to mug you for your security pass so they could get in and out of the building for a variety of nefarious reasons. Ioana started recruiting her runners, or concierges, from MMA fighting gyms and former combat vets on purpose, guys from bad neighborhoods who weren’t gang affiliated. They are not allowed to carry guns on duty, but outside of that all bets are off. 

Since dropping out of school and focusing on her job, Ioana changed the position name to ‘concierge,’ came up with a functional yet discrete uniform of polo shirt (several different colors) and black chinos. In the building they wear nametags clearly identifying them as concierges, outside they wear no identifiers whatsoever, not even a Stark logo on the polo shirts. She put her foot down about that. 

The pay is excellent, and bonuses are frequent, which cuts down on successful bribery attempts. There is a careful screening process, both by SI and by SHIELD for these positions, and self defense exam and training. There is also a tuition program, for those concierges who have other interests or would like to move up in the organization. 

The only identifier of their SI Concierge status is that each of them has a Stark Electrum card for purchases made on the job. If someone in the tower needs shampoo, a bagel, cat litter, a pair of stockings, a new dress shirt, a razor, a concierge can be dispatched. They are also allowed to pick up coffee and snacks for themselves on it if they are so motivated. Only gross abuses get a talking to, and only one concierge has ever been fired over their abuse of the Stark card. 

Ioana is a firm but eminently reasonable manager, and has daily pep talks with her staff. She hires both men and women from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. She knows which ones don’t mind being dispatched to make up or lingerie stores. She knows who can be trusted to “pick up something to make me feel better,” for Sierra J. Or to pick out a replacement if Zerya’s favorite bath bomb is out of stock at LUSH. Concierges are also scheduled to walk the Tower’s dogs, and if their people are on a trip, to play with the Tower’s cats and cuddle them so they don’t get lonely. 

The number of requests for concierges and the number of actual concierges has gone up dramatically since Tony started collecting the remnants of SHIELD into the Tower. Ioana has been given free rein to hire however many people she thinks she needs. 

Ioana worships Steve. She has had a raging crush on him since reading a book on him in grade school, although she thought he was cuter when he was smaller. Knowing that word of what happened with the Accords would likely lead to her quitting, Pepper intervened directly, and granted her a raise, an assistant, and a one time “Please don’t leave us it will devolve into chaos” bonus.   
Ioana stayed, but only a few of her concierges will deign to run things for Tony. Most requests come through Pepper or Michael. Tony started to complain about it once, and Pepper shut him down immediately: “She works for SI, she works for me. Enough.” 

Ioana has had a few chats with Jesus about Tony and the Accords, and is slowly melting towards him again. He does tip heavily for errands. She has actually been heard defending him, if not his actions. 

Ioana wears the same uniform as her concierges, with a tiny enameled pin of Cap’s shield on one lapel. When she’s off the clock, she lives with her younger sister near Columbia University. They have an African grey parrot they inherited when their grandmother died, that has a foul, foul mouth, but fortunately it only speaks Samoan. 

Ioana speaks English, Samoan and Spanish.


	49. Radulovic, Dalida M. Plumber

Dalida Minetzin Radulovic. Plumber. Dalida was born in Rozaje, Montenegro (Yugoslavia at the time) in 1987. She has fair skin, and wears a hijab over her light brown hair, and has brown eyes. She is 5'6", and stocky. When she was 4 the Serbian-Croatian conflict forced her family into a refugee camp. From there they emigrated to the UK, and then the US. She has lived in New York since she was 7. Dalida spent a lot of time playing catch up in school, and did well, but because of harassment took her GED and went to trade school to become a plumber, much to her parents’ chagrin. She has also taken a lot of martial arts and self-defense training and can more than take care of herself. She dresses modestly around her family, but on her own wears jeans with long-sleeved shirts and her hijab, under coveralls. 

Tony hired her to work on the plumbing in Stark Tower after having several other plumbers up and quit. They either thought his designs were crazy or couldn’t take the micromanaging. Dalida is very, very even tempered, until she isn’t. She may have put her fist through drywall at one point because of Tony’s fussing, but neither of them will confirm or deny the source of the hole in the wall on the 16th floor that had to be patched over.

He put her on salary shortly thereafter and offered her an apartment in the Tower. She took it. Never particularly inclined toward romance or marriage, when she read about the study that deprivation and trauma that parents experienced could be inherited by their children, she decided to not get married or have children. The apartment in the Tower means she can choose on what level to interact with her very traditional parents. 

Mostly she enjoys the challenge of working with Tony’s ideas, and actually likes him. Tony enjoys working with her, and views her as an equal in her area of expertise. He’s given her some studio space on one of the lab floors, where she creates metal sculpture out of used pipe, and the occasional plumbing innovation. Tony is very sure to credit her and get her name on the patents. 

Dalida enjoys having her own spaces to live and create. She has not been as observant a Muslim as she has been in the past, and is even considering no longer wearing the hijab, but every morning she puts it on, as not wearing it feels like missing a part of her, even if her faith is not as strong as it once was. 

The thing with the Accords shook Dalida deeply. She likes Tony a great deal, and he has talked at her about why he did it. But she still feels the sting of being a minority somewhere, forced out of her home because of the actions of others. She bites her tongue because she does not feel it is her place to correct him, but she also inwardly cheered when she’d heard about Carolyn’s tirade.

Dalida has PTSD from her early childhood, and while it is largely under control, she does have her sleepless nights. Usually she’ll go to her studio, emerging a couple times during the night for coffee. She and Kassidy get along great, and she feels a warm thrill when Kassidy hugs her that she has yet to figure out. They also spend a lot of time just sitting in companionable silence, if no one else is in.

Dalida speaks English, Montenegrin, Serbian, Croatian, Albanian, and Russian.


	50. Ohmiya, Maxine C. - Nutritionist/Dietitian/Trainer

Maxine (Max) Chrysanthemum Ohmiya. Nutritionist/Dietician/Trainer. Born 1986 in Athens, GA. Max has dark brown hair she wears in a severe, mohawk-like undercut, that is just long enough to style up when she feels like it but usually falls over her forehead in soft waves, and dark brown eyes. She speaks with a soft Georgia drawl. She is short and stocky. Maxine’s mother was a Georgia Beauty Queen, and her father an Airman stationed in GA for long enough to fall in love with a southern belle. They moved a lot when she was a kid, but eventually went back to Georgia. Max has three older brothers. When she graduated from high school, she went to college for Nutrition and got a part time job as a trainer at a local gym. 

Maxine competed in several weight lifting competitions, shying away from body-building because she had enough disordered eating influences around with her mother. When she finished her Nutrition and Physical Education degree (double major), she got a Masters in Sports Kinesiology, and started fighting MMA, in part to horrify her mother. 

She’d been working with a rehab center for a year or so, when she got the offer from a VA in Washington DC. She took the job, and within a few weeks found herself transferred to another rehab center, this one for active duty SHIELD operatives, something she hadn’t realized until she found herself working with Hawkeye after the Battle of New York. He passed the word along that she was great, and she found herself transferred to Stark Tower in New York. 

She worked with Steve a bit after the fall of the Helicarriers, not that he needed a lot of rehab, but she likes to think she helped speed his healing along a bit. She was busy after the Fall. They shipped a lot of the wounded up to New York.

Max is currently at the training base working with Rhodey and Tony. She wasn’t angry at Tony for the Accords, she knows that guilt makes people do weird things. She is angrier at Ross for exploiting that guilt to get Tony to sell out his friends and has requested that Tony warn her if that son of a bitch is going to be on the premises so she doesn’t wind up in prison for assaulting a government official. 

When she isn’t working, she is doing her own training regimen, or in her quarters reading or watching “Murder, She Wrote,” on the entertainment server Tony installed. 

Max speaks English, Spanish, and Japanese.


	51. Nascimento, Micah J. Psychologist

Micah Jude Nascimento. Psychologist. Born 1989 in Tuscon, AZ. Tall, with dark blue-black skin, close cropped hair and light brown eyes. Micah’s father emigrated from Angola, then met and married his Hopi mother. He dresses well, but casually, nice jeans, button down shirts open at the neck, no ties, good shoes. Micah was an excellent student and a great athlete with a four year scholarship for Baseball. He played college ball for the first two years, but after his sophomore. year he decided he’d rather crack down on his studies, and quit the team, forfeiting his scholarship. He had a part-time job that wasn’t quite enough to pay the bills and found himself doing porn to make up the difference, primarily straight interracial porn. 

One master’s degree in Clinical Psychology later, focusing on cult deprogramming and related PTSD, SHIELD brought him in for an interview. When confronted with his porn past, he shrugged and said, “You either want the best person for this job, or you care more that I did porn than you do for the people I can help.” When asked if he was vulnerable to blackmail on the topic, "My folks know, I had to tell them so they’d get quit accusing me of being a drug dealer. The money came from somewhere.“

Micah joined what was left of SHIELD after the Fall of the Helicarriers, and their realizations regarding HYDRA and the Winter Soldier. He has talked to Steve about what happened in DC. He has seen the file on the creation of the Winter Soldier and is sickened and fascinated by it. He has put a lot of time in with the scientists and neurologists in the lab trying to sort out the equipment they’ve captured in raids on former HYDRA strongholds. 

They have him working with some of the captured HYDRA agents to see if he can get to the root of their loyalty and convince them to work with them again. The problem is that far too many of them weren’t brain-washed, they were willing. This offends and frightens Micah on a very visceral level. 

Since coming to New York, Micah has done a lot of late night wandering of the Tower. He’s talked to Jesus, Cassidy, and many of the other Midnight Wanderers, and genuinely likes his co-inhabitants of the Tower. He talks to Zerya a lot, as well. This bothered Stefan, because of Micah’s looks. Micah finally took him aside and told him he had nothing to worry about, he was more likely to make a play for Stefan than Zerya.

Micah enjoys working out. He enjoys the mandatory self-defense training and in general burning off stress in the gym and at the gun range. In his free time, he listens to a lot of old Jazz and classical music in his apartment, and gives Cassidy some good natured ribbing for her musical tastes. He sees Tim as a patient from time to time. Every so often, he does hit the gay bars, and has run into Trey, which startled the both of them. Since then, they’ve kept their distance, while still keeping an eye on one another. 

Micah speaks English, Hopi, Spanish, Umbundu, and Portuguese.


	52. Bakoyan, Darejani S.  Administrative Assistant/Translator

Darejani Sada Bakoyan. Administrative Assistant/Translator. Born 1991 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Darejani has light olive skin, grey eyes, and black hair that bleaches to brown in the sun. She is slender and deceptively strong. Darejani’s family lived in a small village outside of Georgia. While not being outright murdered, as with the Yezidi community in Iraq, Georgian Yezidis faced a great deal of bigotry and persecution, not the least for their religious beliefs and endogamy. Darejani and her siblings learned to speak Kurdish at home, and Georgian and Russian in school. 

At 14 Darejani ran away from home, and found herself hiking, hitch-hiking, and being trafficked across Europe. Somehow she made it to England before being rescued (the police force’s word) or arrested (Darejani’s word), and put into care in Whitby. Her foster mother, helped Darejani with her clothes, make up, and hair, sent her to school, made sure her documentation was changed to reflect her name and gender, and made sure that she received proper medical treatment, had proper asylum documents. 

Darejani attended Trent University in Durham, near Whitby, majoring in Anthropology, and taking some Education courses on the side. 

After University, Darejani was courted by Stark Industries because of the unusual combination of languages she speaks. She began working in their London offices, and was quickly promoted up and transferred to the New York offices, where she was being groomed as a Trainer. 

After the fall of the Helicarriers, Maria Hill has had Darejani focus more heavily on expanding her fluency in the languages she already has, and exploring others. Darejani had accompanied several of the Avengers on a mission into northern Iraq looking for the Winter Soldier. The lead turned out to be false. She felt so very badly for Captain Rogers and patted his shoulder. 

Darejani, like many of those working for SI/SHIELD has PTSD, but it is largely controlled after years of therapy. She doesn’t have nightmares often, but when she does she does not even attempt to sleep again. Her foster mother is doing well back in Whitby and she visits when she can. She is learning hand to hand combat with Natasha Romanoff as well as how to shoot. 

Darejani has a crush on Captain Rogers, because who doesn’t? As well as a somewhat less blatant crush on Natasha, who does frighten her a bit. She likes her co-workers at SI, and Ethel reminds her of her own grandmother.

Darejani speaks Georgian, Kurdish, Arabic, Russian, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian.


End file.
